The brutal early August wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui not only caused a massive scale of damage to the region’s land and residents, but also potentially to Maui’s endangered plant species.
Hawaii, though only making up 1% of U.S. land, is home to 44% of the nation’s endangered and threatened plant species.
Environmental experts say the Maui fires are likely to have devastated some of the island’s native endangered plant species beyond the point of regrowth.
While some of the species in question are fire-resistant, many have no fire resistance whatsoever and could potentially disappear from Maui’s ecosystem completely as a result of the natural disaster.
