Race against time to save Kurdistan’s endangered plant species
SULAIMANI, Kurdistan Region – A small yet dedicated team of scientists is racing against time, climate change, and destructive human activity to document the Kurdistan Region’s indigenous plant life before it vanishes from the slopes of the Zagros Mountains.
“Kurdistan is one of the hotspots for biodiversity and plant diversity – not just in the Middle East but in the entire world,” said plant taxonomist Saman Abdulrahman Ahmad during a recent interview in the office of the Kurdistan Botanical Foundation (KBF) at the American University of Iraq, Sulaimani (AUIS).
Abdulrahman is director of KBF, which was founded as a non-profit organization by a group of botanists and environmentalists in 2013.
The Kurdistan Region sits at a confluence of habitats, topographies, and climates, stretching from the Nineveh Plains to the permanently snow-capped peaks in the Zagros Mountains. It is here that arid desert climes of the Arabian Peninsula meet the temperate air of the Mediterranean. These variations make the region rich in plant life.
In a basement at AUIS, KBF regularly adds to its herbarium, which now stores some 60,000 samples of wild plants collected around the Kurdistan Region. Plants collected in the field are carefully dried and frozen in a six-week process before being catalogued and stored in the chilled room.
Despite its richness, little is known about the diversity of plant life here. “Still there are so many species nobody knows what they are in the mountains,” said Abdulrahman.
When KBF began its floristic study of the Azmer and Goizha mountains that overlook Sulaimani, historical knowledge indicated 56 plant species existed within the zone. “But when KBF surveyed there, they discovered more than 600 species. So there is a big gap in the historical information,” said Nariman Ahmad, a member of the foundation specializing in plant biotechnology.
The foundation has also completed studies in Qaradagh, where they found around 950 wild, native species, and Hawraman, where they collected more than 1,000 plant samples. They are now one year into a four-year study of the Halgurd-Sakran area.
The team is not just cataloguing flora. KBF is also making new discoveries. It researchers have found 45 species that are new to Iraq and 25 that are new to science. One is the cousinia azmerensis, a flowering plant named for Mount Azmer where it grows.
“I love it. I see them like my children,” said Abdulrahman, who has personally discovered 15 species.
Cousinia azmerensis, however, is classified as critically endangered because precious few mature samples were found in the field and located in a limited area.
“Most of the species we have discovered as new are endangered,” Abdulrahman explained.
The environment of the Kurdistan Region faces threats from all sides. The World Bank projects Iraq will get hotter and drier over the next three decades. The regional government’s environmental controls over sectors like the oil industry, gravel mining, and household waste are poor. Millions of acres of forests in the Zagros Mountains have been lost to deforestation, the bombs of Turkey and Iran, and the lack of funding for protection.
Thirty-year old landmines from the Iran-Iraq war and ongoing military activity along the border means swathes of territory are off limits for KBF’s teams. “Especially the areas on the border between Iraq and Iran, in the past, nobody could go there. There are a lot of minefields and military from Iranian side and Iraqi side they don’t allow people to go there and collect materials,” Abdulrahman explained.
Conserving Kurdistan’s wildlife from these threats is the second stage of KBF’s long-term strategy. They are seeking funding for a project to preserve the wild oak trees that grow in the Zagros Mountains and Ahmad hopes to establish a national gene bank of plant species that would involve collecting the seeds and genetic materials of Kurdistan and Iraq’s wild, indigenous flora.
“We are working towards a goal, which is the conservation of the wild and the plant species in Kurdistan,” Ahmad explained. “We think that due to the global warming, climate change, and human activities by overusing natural resources, many plant species are going to disappear. That’s why we have to plan to conserve these.”