Last August, I hiked one of the most popular trails in our area, Shrine Ridge. I was in it for the views, but more than that I was eager to see the thing everyone was talking about: the wildflowers. 

Shrine Ridge didn’t disappoint. I was awestruck by the sweeping meadows. Swaths of yellow and purple asters blanketed a grassy field, one small patch of late-season columbines nestled in a cool shadow, and at the top was the biggest treat of all: a patchwork of flowers in every conceivable color, from the deep pink of rosy paintbrush to the pale purple of the summer’s last lupines, mingled with yellows and whites and blues and reds. 

I couldn’t help but imagine what that same field would look like if any of those flowers went extinct. It would still be pretty, but that wonderful patchwork of plant diversity would be lost, leaving a mountaintop with far less intrigue. 

As I watched an imperiled pika dart from rock to rock, round ears perked up, wildflower bouquet in its mouth, I remembered that caring for plants is just as important as caring for our wonderful animals. Plants serve just as critical a role in our ecosystem, and many are deeply threatened by climate change, habitat loss, and invasive species. Unfortunately, according to the 2020 State of the World’s Plants and Fungi report by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, a staggering 40% of the world’s plants are currently at risk of extinction. 

Colorado’s wildflowers are crucial to our ecosystem, and striking to look at.

You can think about all life on earth as resting on an intricate structure of plant biodiversity. With each plant that disappears, one block of that base gets knocked away. Biodiversity creates a resilient foundation for life, but climate change and other threats are rapidly reducing biodiversity, turning that strong foundation into a teetering stool. With decreasing plant diversity, we are, in turn, less resilient to climate change. With such a vast number of plants at risk, we risk not just losing beautiful fields of wildflowers; millions of lives are at risk. 

That’s not to say we can only throw up our hands as plant after plant ticks out of existence. Alongside the ongoing fight to tackle the climate crisis, there’s incredible work being done to conserve plant biodiversity globally. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault, located on a remote Arctic island in Norway, holds over 1,000,000 frozen seeds from across the world, including thousands of our most important food crops, safeguarding these plants and ensuring the long-term security of our food system. It acts as a backup to the plant “genebanks” that do the same critical work more locally, preserving plant genetic diversity even in the case of ecosystem collapse. These genebanks also allow scientists and farmers to identify or breed crops that are resilient to climate change, an increasingly urgent effort to continue to feed a growing and warming world. 

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault holds over a million frozen seeds from around the world.

Here in Colorado, over 100 plants are endangered, 68 of which exist exclusively in our state, according to the Colorado Natural Heritage Program. Some important plant species, like our iconic aspen trees, are not (yet) considered endangered, but are declining rapidly across the state. Locally, the Betty Ford Alpine Gardens are at the forefront of the effort to conserve fragile alpine plants, from monitoring plants to set conservation priorities to seed banking some of the rarest plants in the world. Get involved in their work—or simply go on a wildflower walk this summer to appreciate the wonderful biodiversity we still enjoy.

Ella Spungen is a Naturalist at Walking Mountains who once worked in a plant library.