Not all trees matter equally: Study identifies key mother trees for endangered species conservation

For some endangered plants, saving the species may depend not only on protecting the population as a whole, but also on identifying the few individual trees that do most of the reproductive work.

The study, published in Forest Ecosystems, focused on Pinus dabeshanensis, a critically endangered pine found endemic to central China’s Dabie Mountains. The researchers found that seed production was extremely uneven among individual mother trees. Most trees produced few or no seeds, while a small number of “dominant mother” trees produced most of the seeds needed for the species’ recovery.

P. dabeshanensis is an ancient pine species with a very limited natural range. Although conservation work has been carried out, the species still struggles to recover. Traditional conservation often treats all trees in a population as equally important, but this study shows that some individual trees may play a much bigger role than others.

Researchers monitored 88 adult P. dabeshanensis trees from 2022 to 2024 in the Miaodao Mountains of Anhui Province, which contain the largest known natural population of the species. They found striking differences among trees. Of the 88 adults, 55 trees (62.5%) produced no seeds during the entire study period. Among the 33 trees that did reproduce, seed production varied greatly, from 38 to 11,195 seeds per tree.

The pattern became even clearer when the researchers looked only at mature seeds. Just six trees, about 7% of the monitored population, produced more than 70% of all mature seeds.

The team also studied what happened after animals carried the seeds away. They tagged and tracked 1,500 seeds from five of the most productive mother trees. Seeds from each tree had a similar chance of being successfully moved and stored by animals. However, trees that produced more mature seeds still made a much larger contribution overall. The most productive tree contributed 113 successfully dispersed seeds, while two less productive trees contributed only 44 and 45.

The results suggest that regeneration failure in P. dabeshanensis is not mainly caused by too many seeds being eaten or failing to spread, but rather by extreme differences in reproductive output among individual mother trees.

The study supports a more targeted approach to conservation. For P. dabeshanensis, this could mean collecting seeds from the most productive mother trees, giving these trees extra protection, helping disperse their seeds, and improving the habitat around them. This approach could also help conservationists protect other endangered plants that face similar problems.

DOI Link:

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.fecs.2026.100464