Jessica McPherson, a botanist with the Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program, was celebrating a wedding anniversary with her husband on a hike in Pennsylvania’s Laurel Highlands in June. Along their route, she noticed an unusual grasslike plant with a bright reddish-purple stem.

She took a photo and conferred with a leading plant authority when she returned to her office. The plant turned out to be a purple sedge, never before recorded in Pennsylvania. It will be added to the state’s endangered species list.

The discovery of the rare plant was cause for celebration among Pennsylvania’s ecosystem caretakers. But the plant’s existence in the state for perhaps centuries, unbeknownst to even the most ardent botanists, indicates the unknowns and uncertainties facing public agencies tasked with finding and protecting rare plants, animals, birds, fish, insects, amphibians and reptiles.

In the Chesapeake Bay region, states such as Pennsylvania, Maryland and Virginia have added protective laws and funding to keep common species common and save dwindling species.

But the species they champion face increasing threats. The agencies cite unrelenting destruction and fragmentation of key habitat, as well as diseases; invasive plants, insects and animals such as wild boar and nutria; impacts of overabundant deer; the poaching and illicit sales of rare specimens; and a changing climate.

“Unfortunately, in conservation you often thrive on small victories, while being surrounded by catastrophic losses,” said John Kleopfer, state herpetologist with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources.

No wonder the endangered species list for all three states is at an all-time high. Pennsylvania is about to add 11 native plants to its endangered list. Virginia in recent years has placed the Piedmont fameflower, black rail and rusty patch bumblebee on its critically imperiled list.

Altogether, Pennsylvania has 428 living organisms in danger of disappearing from the landscape. Maryland has 346 and Virginia, which uses a “critically imperiled” category, has 873.

The majority of endangered species in each state are plants, partly because there are so many of them. In Pennsylvania, for example, there are approximately 3,000 species of plants — more than four times the number of species of mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish combined.

Only species facing the most critical concerns land on the states’ endangered lists. There are other less dire categories for species considered threatened, rare or vulnerable.

The states have also dubbed some species “extirpated” — those that have already disappeared. Among them are mountain lions, bison, wolves, passenger pigeons and Carolina parakeets.

Lesser-known species continue to wink out in modern times.

This fall, Pennsylvania will declare five plants extirpated from the state: the two-seeded copperleaf, hazel dodder, retrorse flatsedge, broad-leaved beardgrass and slender bladderwort.

Data gaps

During heightened environmental awareness in the 1970s and early 1980s, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland passed laws requiring various agencies to determine the status of living organisms and protect them from disappearing.

But keeping tabs on plants, animals and insects has been a difficult business from the start. Despite advances in technology, resource managers say they don’t know how many of the states’ species are faring or, in some cases, if they still exist.

Part of this is because of large gaps in data.

Mammals and birds have been pretty well-monitored through the ages, with sightings on file sometimes going back 200 or more years.

But people haven’t been looking for or tracking many less charismatic but more numerous species such as mussels, moths, beetles, amphibians and especially plants. For example, Pennsylvania listed the St. John’s wort as extirpated because no had reported seeing it since 1920. It was rediscovered in 2021.

Some plant species with very specific habitat requirements exist in tiny and isolated communities. Some mammals, such as voles and shrews, spend almost their entire lives underground and out of sight. So do reptiles and amphibians.

Some species of flatworms only live in a single cave. In Virginia, the endangered harperella plant has been found only in rock crevices on the Quantico Marine Base.

And although protective state agencies are constantly sending parties out to confirm sightings of various species, they don’t have enough funds or staff to meet monitoring needs.

That results in data gaps and many unknowns about just how prevalent or scarce some species are.

“We haven’t crawled into every last corner, and there are still surprises out there,” said Jonathan McKnight, associate director of the Maryland Wildlife and Heritage Service. “Rediscovery of species is not incredibly uncommon, particularly with plants. We will continue to find species in Maryland that we did not know were there.”

The Pennsylvania Natural Diversity Inventory has confirmed the presence of 400 spider species in the state. “However, based on predicted ranges, hundreds more species probably occur,” the document said.

When Virginia started its endangered species program in the 1980s, it declared 369 dragonfly species critically imperiled based on a few reported sightings. But when field surveys were done over the years, it turned out that many were quite common and were removed from the list.

Many secretive reptiles and amphibians faced the same initial lack of inspection. But public interest grew over time, helped by the first Jurassic Park movie and The Crocodile Hunter TV series, which raised interest in such species. Soon, citizen scientists were reporting sightings.

New aids

In recent years, technology has provided some tools to scientists who are seeking and boosting populations of endangered species.

One of the most helpful aids has been environmental DNA, or eDNA. Researchers collect water samples, and DNA found in the water can be used to determine the presence of species in the waterway.

The method has detected threatened wood turtles, hellbenders and freshwater mussels in Virginia.

For some species, seeds or eggs are taken into labs where they can be placed under ideal conditions for propagation. That’s helped expand and start new populations of freshwater mussels in Virginia.

In Pennsylvania, researchers have been using drones since at least 2018 to find rare plants and animals in places such as rock cliffs and large wetlands, where scientists can’t go on foot.

The Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Project has teamed with the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to fit evening grosbeaks with solar-powered transmitters. This allows them to track the birds’ winter movements to try to find out why they have declined by 92% in Pennsylvania since 1970.

Volunteers from the Pennsylvania Plant Conservation Alliance collect seeds from Jacob’s ladder, a globally rare plant. They are propagated at Longwood Gardens’ labs near Philadelphia, then planted at sites in the Poconos to strengthen wild populations.

A changing climate

Global warming and extremes in weather are not good news for vulnerable plants and wildlife.

“As our climate changes, some state-listed species with very specific requirements for growing conditions will certainly suffer. This includes species that are at the southern edge of their range in Pennsylvania and prefer a cooler climate like that found in the upper Midwest or northeast United States,” said Kelly Sitch, an ecologist with the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources.

The blue false indigo plant is already being affected, said Cheyenne Moore, a DCNR ecological program specialist. It grows only along the Allegheny River and tributaries that are kept open by scouring from ice breakups. But in recent warm winters, the waters have not iced over, allowing other vegetation to dominate the shores. Also, extreme rainfalls have inundated the plants when they should be flowering, preventing them from reproducing.

The Pennsylvania Natural Heritage Program recently assessed climate change vulnerability for 85 species of animals, fish, plants, birds, reptiles and amphibians. Some 37 species were rated as extremely or highly vulnerable, including the eastern hellbender, the state amphibian. Other species are expected to have resilience, and a handful of bird species will likely see population increases. But much remains unknown.

For birds across the Chesapeake region, scientists are concerned that changing and variable climate patterns will alter food sources and habitat and will no longer be timed for when migratory birds arrive.

In Maryland, sea level rise is already impacting such endangered species as the diamondback terrapin and the black rail, a shorebird highly dependent on marsh habitat.

In Virginia, many rare plants exist where brackish water meets fresh water. “They are disappearing because of sea level rise,” said Anne Chazal, chief biologist at the Natural Heritage Inventory run by the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation.

Higher up, on mountaintops, Virginia scientists are worried about the fate of Shenandoah salamanders, one species in a category known as “sky island” salamanders, which can survive only in the specific temperature ranges of high altitudes.

They live most of their lives in a small area, sometimes under a single log. “They simply have nowhere to go and don’t disperse well,” Kleopfer said.

“A dozen species of salamanders will go extinct in the next hundred years because of climate change,” he predicted.

Invasive species can also gain prominence in a changing climate, causing problems that ripple through the ecosystem. In the Bay region, “a rapidly changing environment favors invasive species that open the door where the ecological balance is screwed up,” said McKnight of the Maryland Wildlife and Heritage Service.  

Success stories

Although threats to the most vulnerable species in Bay states show no signs of going away any time soon, there have been success stories from protection efforts.

In Maryland, the American tiger salamander exists entirely in circular shallow-water depressions known as Delmarva bays that are found in sand on the Eastern Shore. For generations, farmers tried to dry out these wetlands with trenches and drain tiles. Roads were built through them. Working with landowners, Maryland officials have purchased and restored a number of Delmarva bays. In some, eggs have been recovered from mating salamanders and used to jump-start others.

At Soldiers Delight Natural Environment Area, a serpentine barren north of Baltimore, controlled burns are helping to bring back 39 species of rare, endangered or threatened plants that evolved when fires on the landscape were common.

Virginia has been strategic about buying land to protect plant species under threat. One example is the Bald Knob Natural Area Preserve in Franklin County. The Piedmont fameflower is found on a bare knob there and in only a handful of other places on the globe.

Worried that the rare plant, located on private land popular for its views, would be trampled to death, the state bought 112 acres in 2016. A parking area, trails that avoid the plant and interpretive signs are in the works.

Some 65 other preserves have been created expressly to preserve biodiversity in the state.

In the Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia has protected sinkhole ponds, helping to stabilize populations of the Virginia sneezeweed plant.

Although they are required to protect endangered species, state agencies in Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia don’t have regulatory power to stop construction projects for adversely affecting state-listed endangered species. But they consult with developers about their concerns, which sometimes leads to altered plans that avoid or at least mitigate harm to the rarest living things in their state.

For example, when it was discovered a wind farm project would have impacted the threatened Allegheny plum plant on a rock outcrop, the Pennsylvania Department of Conservation and Natural Resources worked with developers to reconfigure the site design to avoid the spot.

In another case, agency officials got developers of an oil well project to change the location of an access road and pad locations to leave a buffer around the threatened red currant plant.