Our catalog of active and extinct organisms is considered to be: "That we observed" What that translates into: The organism has adapted to a new environment. (Pretty cool)
it would be interesting to have a shared system (like a Kafka system) to report sightings and alerts about extinct animals/plants. This would help with an automated approach.
They provided an awful lot of information on where exactly it was found. Haven't we learned not to provide poachers such a nice little map of where to find <rare organism>?
Hawaii has had trouble with this type of thing before... back when there were still "wild" kava stands (long-forgotten native gardens) in the forests.
Because of the high value of those decades old plants, they were often poached. Even micro-chipping couldn't prevent their eventual complete loss from the forests.
Kava (or Awa, as it's called in Hawaii) is a "canoe plant", meaning it was one of the original plants the Polynesians brought with them when they first settled Hawaii. But then the Christians arrived and put a complete stop to Hawaiian kava culture and farming. They had to revive the practice from almost nothing, had to trek through forests looking for old lost kava from which to propagate and save Hawaiian cultivars (kava doesn't seed and cannot grow without human intervention).
Based on the terrain you're going to have a heck of a time getting there. I'm not really sure what the value would be selling it, you'd either need to sell fast or have the knowledge to keep it alive, even then you still have to fence it.
The only people I could really see messing with it would be trolls that just want to destroy a nearly extinct flower, but that terrain would surely be off-putting for most if not all.
You're assuming a human would try and physically approach and remove it. It was discovered by a drone, why wouldn't a poacher use a drone to retrieve it?
I don't know what the sorrounding terrain looks like, but from person experience it is expensive to buy the longer range transmitters you'll likely need for this (~1000$+ transportation to there).
But since I don't think the flower holds much black market value, your only real motivation would be just to be a jerk. And you'd have to be really trying too.
It's fairly straightforward to get a drone there. (Even regular off-the-shelf 2.4GHz RC gear and 5GHz video gear will happily get that sort of distance line-of-sight with relatively inexpensive high gain antennas). I'd bet any of the mid or high end consumer DJI drones could get there and take pictures of it.
It's much much more difficult to put together a drone that's capable of pulling a plant out of a piece of rocky ground reliably without damaging it. You can't buy that from DJI. UI doubt you can buy that from _anyone_. It _might_ be possible by mounting a consumer-grade robot arm on a commercially available drone. But you'd be building/programming/testing it yourself, and at that range in that terrain most failure modes probably mean you won't get your drone-capable-of-carrying-a-robot-arm-and-exotic-plant back.
The motivation is largely irrelevant - if someone wants it, they'll get it. Not to mention the survey drone itself got a closeup, so equipment isn't an issue.
It took me about 5 minutes to ballpark the location [0] from this still [1] in the video. Branching off the hiking trail above and walking down the ridge line or sitting in a boat off the coast will both put you ~1000ft away line-of-sight. That's well within range. I'd have to agree that the group behind the study leaked a little too much info on this.
