|Scientific Name:||Nymphaea thermarum|
|Red List Category & Criteria:||Extinct in the Wild ver 3.1|
|Reviewer/s:||Magdalena, C. & Smith, K.G.|
This species is considered as Extinct in the Wild. It disappeared from this location due to over-exploitation of the hot spring that fed its fragile habitat, and no plant is known to have survived in the wild. Habitat restoration for reintroduction of the species is recommended.
|Range Description:||It is endemic to one single locality Mashyuza, southwest Rwanda, only known in the wild from the type locality, collected in 1987.|
|Range Map:||Click here to open the map viewer and explore range.|
It disappeared from this location due to over-exploitation of the hot spring that fed this fragile habitat, and no plant is known to have survived in the wild. Repeated searchers of numerous hotsprings in Central Africa failed to find a single population (Fischer pers. comm. 2010). At present all the extant plants are in cultivation at Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew in United Kingdom and in Bonn Botanic Gardens, Germany.
Before becoming extinct in the wild, Nymphaea thermarum occurred in Mashyuza, southwest Rwanda (Africa).
There are over 50 Nymphaea thermarum plants in the Living Collection at Kew, which is the only place in the world where it is being propagated regularly and in large quantities.
|Habitat and Ecology:||Damp mud created by the overflow of a freshwater hot spring, where the water has cooled to around 25˚C.|
|Major Threat(s):||The only population of this species has died out as a consequence of over-exploitation of the aquifer that fed the hot spring that kept the plants moist and at a constant temperature.|
|Conservation Actions:||This species is now easily propagated and cultivated at Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew. The spring water where it is native is still flowing but it sequestered before it reaches the surface. However, with the appropiate conservation actions such as site protection and restoration, and a re-introduction programme, there could be an opportunity to reintroduce Nymphaea thermarum to Rwanda.|
|Citation:||Juffe, D. 2010. Nymphaea thermarum. In: IUCN 2013. IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Version 2013.2. <www.iucnredlist.org>. Downloaded on 18 April 2014.|
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