COSEWIC assessment and status report on the bear's-foot sanicle, Sanicula arctopoides, in Canada

'Four subpopulations of Bear’s-foot Sanicle have been discovered since 1999, when fieldwork was conducted for the original status report. All four subpopulations have fewer than 70 mature individuals and the smallest of them, on Discovery Island, only had two mature individuals at last count. The presence of previously unreported populations of several other rare plant species in the vicinity of each of the four recently discovered subpopulations of Bear’s-foot Sanicle suggests that these are not recently established, but rather are long-established but previously unreported subpopulations. Sizable fluctuations in the size of the large subpopulation on Trial Islands have masked any trend in the size of the Canadian population of Bear’s-foot Sanicle but most of the other subpopulations are stable or in decline. The subpopulations at Saxe Point and Bentinck Island appear to have declined by more than 90 percent over the past 16 years”--Preface (p. x).