Southwestern Rare and Endangered Plants

Unusual soils, compared to surrounding common soils, act as edaphic habitat islands and often harbor rare plants. These edaphic elements can be disjuncts or endemics. Two rare wild buckwheats from southeastern Arizona that grow on Tertiary lacustrine lakebed deposits have been found to be a disjunct, and an endemic. Eriogonum apachense from the Bylas area is determined to be a disjunct expression of E. heermannii var. argense, a Mojave Desert taxon from northern Arizona and adjacent California and Nevada, not a distinct endemic species. At a historical location of E. apachense near Vail, Arizona, a new species of Eriogonum, also in subgenus Eucycla, was discovered growing on mudstones of the Oligocene Pantano Formation. It was also recently found on outcrops of the Plio-Pleistocene Saint David Formation above the San Pedro River near Fairbank, Arizona.