STEPH PENN

This series seeks to bring awareness to both the beauty and the threats to California’s botanical diversity through plant portraits and stories.

The California Floristic Province is a global biodiversity hotspot. About a third of California’s approximately 7,000 plant species and varieties are found nowhere else in the world.

But California’s plants are declining. Hundreds of species are already listed as rare, threatened or endangered. According to the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, “it is estimated that approximately 66 percent of California’s endemic plant species will experience decreases of up to 80 percent in the size of their ranges within the next 100 years.”