Tulipa kolpakowskiana

This species is threatened by livestock overgrazing, urbanisation and infrastructure development, expansion of agricultural land, climate change, and collection and trade. Livestock overgrazing is causing declines in habitat quality across large areas of Central Asia as trampling and grazing causes damage to ecosystems including to this species which is often found growing in areas used for livestock grazing (Davletkeldiev 2006). The development of infrastructure and expansion of urban areas, including roads, is leading to the loss of subpopulations that were growing near settlements, whilst the enlargement of agricultural areas is also leading to similar declines in habitat areas and the loss of some subpopulations especially as ploughing of these fields causes severe damage to tulips. In addition, this species is also often collected from wild subpopulations and in Kazakhstan there is a local trade in specimens of this plant leading to damage to subpopulations especially those near settlements and roads which are the easiest to collect from. Finally, climate change is projected to cause large areas of habitat to become unsuitable in the future (Wilson et al. 2021), although there remains some uncertainty around the accuracy of these predictions, meaning the impact of climate change needs to be monitored carefully for this species. Currently the main threats are from infrastructure development and agriculture especially ploughing of areas where tulips are growing.

This species is reported as Vulnerable in Kyrgyzstan (Davletkeldiev 2006), Threatened in Kazakhstan (Baitulin 2014), and Near Threatened in China (BGCI 2022b). This species is known to occur in the Ile-Alatau National Park, Almaty National Reserve, Altyn-Emel National Park, and Alakol Biosphere Reserve in Kazakhstan, although this covers only a small part of the population with no protection for higher altitude subpopulations. This species is not in any protected areas in Kyrgyzstan. The species is in 46 ex situ collections (BGCI 2022a) including the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. This species may require translocation efforts in the near future due to rapid shifts in habitat caused by climate change (Wilson et al. 2021), which given the limited dispersal ability of tulips, this species may not be able to naturally migrate with. There is a need to improve awareness and education surrounding this species.