A photo taken in the Queensland outback has brought back a plant thought lost for nearly 60 years.
Researchers say Ptilotus senarius, a rare species last documented in 1967, was rediscovered after professional horticulturalist Aaron Bean photographed an unusual shrub while helping band birds on a large property in remote northern Australia and later uploaded the images to iNaturalist.
The photos were eventually spotted by botanist Anthony Bean from the Queensland Herbarium, who recognised the species immediately. Anthony Bean had described the species himself a decade earlier.
“It was very serendipitous,” said Thomas Mesaglio from the UNSW School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, who documented the rediscovery for the Australian Journal of Botany.
“Aaron Bean is an avid iNaturalist user who opportunistically took some photos of a few plants that were interesting on the property.”
Ptilotus senarius grows in rugged terrain near the Gulf of Carpentaria in northern Australia. Before this find, scientists believed it may have joined about 900 plant species that have disappeared from the wild globally since the 1750s.
With Aaron Bean’s photographs, Anthony Bean’s identification and help from the property owner in collecting a specimen, researchers were able to confirm the species is still alive in the wild.
The plant has now been moved from presumed extinct to critically endangered, which researchers say allows conservation efforts to focus on protecting it.
“It’s one of these situations where everything had to fall into place and there was a bit of good fortune involved,” Mesaglio said.
The rediscovery has also drawn attention to the growing role of citizen science in biodiversity research.
Researchers say members of the public are increasingly uploading photos of plants and animals to platforms such as iNaturalist, helping scientists relocate lost species and identify species new to science.
Mesaglio said those tools matter in Australia because the continent is vast and biologically rich, and scientists cannot survey every region themselves. He said access is also limited because about one third of Australia is privately owned land.
“If you are the property owner or you’re someone who has permission from the owner to be there then suddenly it opens up this whole new world,” Mesaglio said.
Researchers are now encouraging more people, especially landholders, to contribute observations.
In New South Wales, the Land Libraries project run by the state’s Biodiversity Conservation Trust provides training and equipment to help landowners document wildlife and plants on their properties and upload the records to citizen science platforms.
Mesaglio said programs like that improve scientific access to remote or private areas and help build public interest in conservation.
“Engaging landholders themselves with science and the natural world and getting them more passionate about diversity makes them far more likely to be interested and invested in protecting that diversity,” he said.
Mesaglio said detailed observations are especially useful. He said photos of leaves, bark, stems or the whole plant can help identify species when a close-up of a flower is not enough. He also said notes about soil conditions, nearby vegetation, pollinators or even smell can help researchers.
“The more information you can provide and the more context you can provide, the more potential uses that that record will have in the future.”
In separate research, Mesaglio found that iNaturalist had already been cited in scientific papers involving 128 countries and thousands of species.
Read more from Science Daily.
