Rare plant discovered in Maryland added to state endangered list

Decades ago, in the 1980s, two botanists working along the Eastern Shore wetlands of Maryland discovered a rare, grassy plant with rust-colored spikelets.

The plant, known as the Mid-Atlantic beaksedge, was recently declared threatened and endangered by the state’s Department of Natural Resources. It joined the list of endangered and rare plants this year, alongside seven others.

The beaksedge can only be found in seasonal ponds in three U.S. locations —Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland — along the mid-Atlantic coast. One of those wetlands is in the Delmarva Peninsula, a stretch of land between the Delaware and Chesapeake Bays.

The botanists who discovered the species in the 1980s believed it to be the Harper’s beaksedge and recorded it as such. That label remained until 2023, when another botanist who authored a paper about the Mid-Atlantic beaksedge realized that the plant that had been identified decades earlier was mislabeled.

The botanist, Amanda Eberly, working alongside Robert Naczi, corrected the record to note that a new species had been found all those years before.

It typically grows to be 2 feet tall, but faces increased risks for extinction as wetlands are drained or altered to accommodate agriculture, according to the New York Botanical Garden.

“The bay and its rivers are beautiful, so people naturally want to be near and build in those spaces,” said Julie Luecke, a Maryland coastal resource scientist for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. “But as you get closer to those wetlands, those are fragile ecosystems, and they’re being pressed on one side by development pressure and then on the other side by sea-level rise.”

Native plants are critical to ecosystems in Maryland, providing the oxygen we breathe and acting as host plants for insects that pollinate crops.

More than that, these organisms remove carbon dioxide from the air and hold on to soil, which helps fight erosion, Luecke explained. Wetlands are not meant to be underwater. They are only submerged with tidal cycles. That, she said, means rising sea levels are drowning and shrinking wetlands.

“Plants are also deeply tied to Maryland’s history and culture, and they play a role in our future too,” DNR said in a release. “Extinction of just one plant species could mean the loss of a potential disease cure or biomedical discovery, highlighting the importance of preserving them.”