Conservation status of native plant hybrids in the British Virgin Islands.

backgroundHybridization is an evolutionary event present in the natural world. Several studies suggest that natural hybridization is an important process in plant evolution, creating new genetic combinations which can play a vital role in speciation (Soltis and Soltis 2009, Soltis 2013, Neri et al. 2017, Taylor and Larson 2019). Therefore, it is important to understand and protect naturally occurring hybrids, conserving their ecological novelties and new traits, such as the ability to explore new niches, different from those of the parental species (Soltis 2013, Supple and Shapiro 2018).The British Virgin Islands (BVI) is a UK Overseas Territory situated in the Caribbean biodiversity hotspot (Myers et al. 2000). To date, three natural hybrids are known to occur within this territory: Tillandsia × lineatispica Mez, Anthurium × selloanum K.Koch and NEW INFORMATION: In this paper, we discuss the conservation status of all the known, naturally occurring, native hybrids in the the British Virgin Islands and we provide distribution data, including new records, from across these hybrid species ranges. Although conservation assessments of hybrids are out of the scope of the published IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN Standards and Petitions Committee 2019), we use the IUCN Red List Criteria and Categories (version 3.1) to establish an equivalent conservation status of these hybrids and discuss conservation action due to the potential evolutionary importance of these naturally occurring hybrids. These assessments provide the necessary baseline information for prioritising species conservation and making informed management decisions, such as establishing the BVI's Tropical Important Plant Areas (TIPAS) network (Sanchez et al. 2019).