Musa banksii

In Queensland, major threats to biodiversity include land clearing for urban development and agriculture, inappropriate grazing and fire regimes, and invasive plants and animals (Department of Environment and Science 2018). New Guinea's rainforests are being logged, cleared, and converted at a rapid rate due to timber extraction, subsistence agriculture, and expansion of industrial agriculture, with a further threat posed by the mining industry: between 1972 and 2002, Papua New Guinea lost more than 5 million hectares of forest and a further 2% of the country's primary forest has been lost since (Butler 2006, Mongabay 2019). However, the specific impact of deforestation on members of the Musa genus is somewhat difficult to quantify: while clear-felling or land conversion is likely to be detrimental to the species, wild bananas spring up in transient, often man-made, habitats and thus may benefit from human disturbance to some extent (Simmonds 1962). As well as these larger-scale threats, Musa banksii is thought to suffer from a great burden of pests and diseases (Argent 1976), with banana freckle fungus particularly problematic in Queensland (Office of the Gene Technology Regulator 2016). The species is also a popular food plant for feral pigs which tend to eat the whole plant, while its suspected pollinator Syconycteris australis can also be a pest through consumption of the blossoms (Hyland et al. 2010, Office of the Gene Technology Regulator 2016).

The genus Musa is listed in Annex I of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA) which aims to guarantee sustainable agriculture and food security through the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, as well as ensuring the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising out of their use (FAO 2009). According to the Musa Germplasm Information System, 53 M. banksii germplasm accessions of wild origin are held worldwide; 25 of these were collected from Papua New Guinea, with the remaining 28 of unknown wild origin. Of these accessions, 30 are held by the International Transit Centre (ITC) in Belgium; 12 by the Centre africain de recherche sur bananes et plantains (CARBAP) in Cameroon; four by the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) in Uganda; three by the Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement (CIRAD) in Guadeloupe, two by the Institute of Fruit Tree Research, Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences (IFTR/GDAAS) in China, and one by each of the Centre National de Recherches Agronomiques (CNRA) in Côte d'Ivoire and the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry (DAFF), South Johnstone in Australia (Ruas et al. 2017). Eight botanical gardens are listed as sites of ex situ conservation for this species (BGCI 2019). This species is known to occur in multiple protected areas across its range, so passive conservation is presumed in these localities (Protected Planet 2019); it is unclear whether active management is apparent in any of these areas.