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

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).