Photographs on the Arkive website have helped naturalists identify two previously unrecorded species of magnolia.
In 2010, Roberto Pedraza Ruiz gave Arkive a series of photos he had taken in a cloud forest within eastern Mexico’s Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve. One was identified as being the magnolia, Magnolia dealbata, classified as Endangered on the IUCN Red List. But the image raised questions for Dr José Antonio Vázquez, a world-leading botanist at the University of Guadalajara, when he came across it during a search of Arkive’s online flora and fauna fact-files. Dr Vázquez asked for more images and it emerged that Pedraza Ruiz had discovered two new species of magnolia.