Botanist Florencia Peredo Ovalle works in her greenhouse in Gardnerville, Nevada, Tuesday, May 21, 2024. Ovalle, who works for mining company Ioneer, cares for specimens of Tiehm’s buckwheat as part of an experiment aimed at helping to keep the extremely rare desert plant from going extinct while still allowing the company to dig for lithium on land where it grows.
Conservationists contend that mining would eradicate the plant from its current habitat and that the efforts to transplant the greenhouse-grown specimens to reclaimed mined areas are unproven. There are nearly 25,000 of the plants in the wild on federal land near the mine site along the Nevada border with California. They were discovered only in the mid-1980s and resemble a scrawny dandelion during the few weeks of the year when they bloom.
Unlike most mining operations, Ioneer plans to backfill sections of ground and restore habitat as the mining moves laterally along what it says is an unusually horizontal seam of lithium.