Many plants became rare or endangered due to many factors among them urbanization, overgrazing and climate change. what is the most important priority to do?
1- protection of the environment.
or
2- collecting seeds of the endangered plant to cultivate them in protected area such as botanical gardens.
or
3- preserving the seeds in seeds banks
or
4- performing phytochemical and biological studies on small quantity of the plant in order to isolate important metabolites which can be later synthesized chemically.
or
5- performing plant tissue and cell culture on the endangered plant to produce in vitro then to introduce them in the original habitat under particular care and protection.
The process must involve several actions reduced to basically two actions: protection "in situ" and "ex situ". With that, you will be including the first three options that you propose. The number 5 is included as protection "ex situ". Phytochemical studies are complex and usually need an important supply of tissues, therefore, I will not include that as priority. If you preserve the plant, you can make further studies when necessary.
Propagation through tissue culture, conservation measures and drone thrown plantation
It will depend on the situation and the species. If the site where the species grows naturally can be protected against the major threat, then protection in situ is the first priority. If, at the other extreme, the wild population is certain to be lost, than the plants should be moved ex situ, as whole plants, seeds, cuttings, tissues or whatever is practical. If there is no suitable botanical garden or similar facility that can maintain an ex situ population, growing or frozen, then transplanting the population to the nearest safe site with suitable environmental conditions is better than leaving them to die. Reality is often between these extremes, in which case protecting the population in situ should be coupled with establishing an ex situ insurance population as back-up. If seeds are available and can tolerate drying and freezing, then seed-banking is cheap and easy, and does not need to take place in a similar environment. Finally, any additional ecological information you can obtain - pollination, seed dispersal, germination, natural enemies, shade tolerance etc. - will be useful for long-term management both in and ex situ.
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