SANNINE, Lebanon: Abu Rabih has lived and made his living in the mountains near Sannine for most of his life.

He has farmed on terraces cut into the smaller slopes, among the purple thistles and the human size tufts of sweet smelling yellow flowers.

Over the course of his 75 years, Abu Rabih has seen the landscape change.

More people have moved to the area, he says. Construction has increased. And some plants have vanished, he adds, and along with them wild animals. He says the area’s last bear was killed “between 1945 and 1950,” and now “I see very few” of the once commonplace wolves and hyenas.

It isn’t just Abu Rabih who has noticed these losses. This country contains around 2,300 known plant species, and 92 of these, such as Sannine’s spiky purple Cousinia Libanotica, only grow here. According to a recent report, many of these plants, and the habitats in which they grow, are under threat.

Conducted by local researchers on behalf of the International Union of the Conservation of Nature, “Important Plant Areas of the South and East Mediterranean Region” identifies 20 “important plant areas” in the country as priority areas for conservation.

Abu Rabih’s Sannine is one of the 20. The three primary areas the report deems to be of the highest priority are the Makmel Mountains, Qammouaa-Dinnieh, and the Jabel Moussa-Nahr Ibrahim area.

One of the report’s authors, Mohammad al-Zein, who teaches at the Lebanese American University, says choosing 20 areas, let alone narrowing it down to three, wasn’t easy. “The entire country is an important plant area,” he says. “Lebanon is a biodiversity hotspot within a biodiversity hotspot, which is the Mediterranean.”

The report mentions urbanization, climate change, deforestation, and tourism as among the major threats to plants here.

If Abu Rabih is concerned about the loss of plants and animals in his mountains, he has also occasionally made a living off of his surroundings, and not just by farming.

He occasionally makes and sells charcoal. This process involves building a pyramid with wood he has chopped, covering it with leaves and soil, and setting it alight.

Lately, he says that the process of producing charcoal “has changed a bit. Now there are a lot of people working in it illegally.”

He says that the oak trees he uses for charcoal grow back after they are cut down. “[In the past] we used to chop [the oak] tree down [only] every 30 years,” he says. “The bad thing now is that there are some people cutting down pine trees. These kind [of trees] don’t grow again after they are cut.”

Mariana Yazbek, a professor at the American University of Beirut and another of the report’s authors, says that Abu Rabih is exactly the type of person that today’s conservation efforts should try to reach.

“This is a person who has lived off of [local] resources, and they have seen how they have declined and how it has reflected their life directly,” she says.

“The old idea of having a protected area that’s fenced and no one can come in, it might work in some areas, especially those that that are bigger than Lebanon, [where] resources are plenty.”

But not here. Yazbek says that conservation should now focus on management and sustainability. Although there are showy plants that exist only in Lebanon, such as the purple Iris Sofarana, she says the collection of a common food item, thyme (zaatar), exemplifies the direction conservation should head in.

“In the past it used to be the community [who collected thyme],” Yazbek says. “In a certain village, they knew their surroundings, so they would collect it in a sustainable way to ensure they would have some next year.”

Now, workers are hired to pick thyme, and they pull it up from its roots. Like the cutting of pine trees or the overharvesting of oak near Sannine, this does not encourage re-growth.

“If you teach people how to collect herbs in a sustainable manner, so they can use them to make products and sell them, they will make money out of it,” Yazbek says. “Then they will be encouraged to conserve their area because they will benefit from conservation.”

Before this sort of community based conservation begins, the authors have a lot of work to do. Their report is mostly based on written literature that’s outdated, some of which goes back to 1930.

“In this literature we found 140 threatened species,” says Yazbek. “Considering all the urbanization in the past 80 years, I would assume this number has gone up by many-fold.”

For now, until the funding for their field work comes through, the authors have begun to take the public on biweekly “Wild Plant Walks.”

In addition to documenting plant life, Yazbek says that the walks aim “to increase the awareness of the diversity of plants that we have here … the orchid family is the biggest family in flowering plants, it has about 30,000 species. But everyone knows the one species … that is being sold at every flower shop.”

“So part of these walks is to show people that what you see in that florist shop is just one thing.” There are also wild orchids here, she says. “There is a wild diversity that people are simply not aware of.”

And maybe, says Yazbek, the walkers just “might know something about plants that we don’t know.”

To find out more about the Wild Plant Walks, visit www.ibsar.org