The story began in August 2025, when the researchers were browsing Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and encountered a video showing a flowering gesneriad in its native habitat. The plant’s white flowers and distinctive rounded upper corolla lobes immediately caught their attention. Its overall appearance suggested a member of the former genus Dayaoshania, a group now merged into the broader genus Oreocharis, but the floral features did not match either of the two species already known from that lineage. After contacting the videographer, the team managed to obtain wild individuals, and careful dissection and comparison confirmed that they were looking at an undescribed species.

The discovery carries particular scientific weight because of the group’s tangled taxonomic history. Dayaoshania was established in 1983 around a single remarkable species, Dayaoshania cotinifolia, found on Dayao Mountain in Guangxi, which bears a butterfly-shaped corolla unlike anything else in the family. For years it was considered a primitive lineage of Gesneriaceae because its stamens are attached near the base of the corolla and its anthers are bilocular and parallel rather than diverging. Molecular phylogenetics later overturned that view, and subsequent studies showed that Oreocharis and a series of similar-looking genera together form a single monophyletic group. In an expanded circumscription, Oreocharis absorbed ten former genera, including Dayaoshania, Ancylostemon, Bournea, Briggsia, Deinocheilos, Isometrum, Opithandra, Paraisometrum, Thamnocharis and Tremacron. Species of the Dayaoshania type are therefore of significant value for understanding evolutionary relationships within the family.

To characterize the new species rigorously, the authors measured morphological characters on ten mature living individuals sampled from different microhabitats within the only known population, covering sun-exposed and shaded as well as wetter and drier sites. Each character was measured three times per individual with digital calipers to minimize observation error, and mean values were reported. Voucher specimens were deposited in the herbarium of the South China Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The holotype was prepared from a cultivated flowering plant in May 2025, traced back to material introduced from Shigou Town in Sihui City.

Morphologically, Oreocharis sihuiensis is a perennial herb with a short rhizomatous stem and a rosette of basal leaves. The leaf blades are chartaceous, ovate to broadly elliptic or nearly rounded, and densely white-pubescent on both surfaces. Its inflorescences are branched cymes bearing one to ten flowers, with a corolla that is white externally and marked with rose red at the throat of the upper tube and yellow at the throat of the lower tube inside. The stamens number two, occasionally one or three, and the species possesses three staminodes — sterile stamens — a feature that proves decisive in telling it apart from its closest relatives.

That distinction rests on a suite of precise characters. Oreocharis sihuiensis most closely resembles Oreocharis dayaoshanioides, but differs in having leaf blades that are densely pubescent above with hairs only 0.2 to 0.5 millimeters long, whereas the related species carries sparse to dense villous hairs longer than one millimeter. The lobes of the upper corolla lip are subrounded with a rounded apex, rather than broadly ovate with an acute tip. The new species has three staminodes where its relative has none or two, a disc with a cleft margin rather than a subentire one, shorter filaments of roughly six millimeters compared with eight to twelve millimeters, and capsules about one centimeter long rather than about two centimeters. Compared with Oreocharis cotinifolia, it shows serrulate leaf margins, glabrous pistil and stamens, and a ring-like rather than stellate disc. The authors provide a formal identification key to all three Dayaoshania-type species to separate them reliably.

The species grows on moist slopes and rock walls beneath mixed evergreen broad-leaved and bamboo forest at an elevation of only about 100 meters, flowering from April to May and fruiting from May to July. It is known exclusively from its type locality in Shigou Town, where the entire area of occurrence is estimated at less than 100 square meters. The plant is familiar to local residents under the vernacular name Shi Shang Lian, meaning Lotus Born on Rock, and the formal Chinese name Sì Huì Yáo Shān Jù Tái. The specific epithet sihuiensis honors the type locality, Sihui City.

That local fame is precisely what endangers it. Oreocharis sihuiensis is a well-known ethnobotanical resource, widely harvested by villagers who process the plant into medicinal tea. Its folk name leads to frequent confusion with two varieties of the related Oreocharis benthamii, both traditionally used in Guangdong folk medicine as treatments for liver ailments. The resulting demand has driven intensive over-collection and trade, severely compromising the species’ survival. Compounding the pressure, the surrounding bamboo forest is being felled, fragmenting and shrinking the already minuscule habitat. Field surveys found no juvenile individuals or recruitment, indicating a continuing and rapid population decline, with habitat loss estimated to exceed 30 percent over the past decade. Applying IUCN Red List Criteria D and B2 a, b (ii, iii, v), the authors preliminarily assess the species as Critically Endangered.

Beyond the plant itself, the discovery highlights a novel and double-edged pathway for taxonomic science. Social media platforms can turn ordinary members of the public into unintentional contributors to biodiversity documentation, accelerating the discovery of species that might otherwise go unnoticed. Yet the same channels can expose precise locations of rare plants to poachers and collectors, particularly when the species has horticultural appeal or medicinal value. The authors recommend that conservation authorities and scientific journals establish guidelines for anonymizing or generalizing locality data for critically endangered species while still meeting scientific standards for replicability. In this case, the team deliberately managed the timing of releasing detailed locality information, publishing it only after the formal species description to avoid worsening the threat.

Oreocharis sihuiensis joins a growing list of Chinese gesneriads described in recent years as botanical surveys intensify across the country’s fragmented subtropical forests. Its fate now depends on whether the last scattered individuals near a village in Sihui can be protected from the medicinal trade and habitat destruction that have already reduced them to so few. For a species that announced itself to science through a phone screen, its survival will depend on how quickly that attention translates into conservation on the ground.

Subject of Research: Discovery and conservation assessment of the critically endangered new plant species Oreocharis sihuiensis (Gesneriaceae) from Guangdong, China

Article Title: Oreocharis sihuiensis ( Gesneriaceae ), a critically endangered new species from Guangdong Province, China

Article References: Ji, L.-B., Wen, F., Jin, X.-H., Xu, Y.-D., Li, B.-H., & Tang, B. (2026). Oreocharis sihuiensis (Gesneriaceae), a critically endangered new species from Guangdong Province, China. PhytoKeys, 276, 175-182. https://doi.org/10.3897/phytokeys.276.190710

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3897/phytokeys.276.190710

Keywords: Oreocharis sihuiensis, Gesneriaceae, new species, Guangdong, China, Critically Endangered, IUCN Red List, taxonomy, social media discovery, medicinal plant over-collection, biodiversity, plant conservation