Few people might know it, but being a botanist sometimes means living on the edge in a high-risk occupation.

For more than 40 years, field botanists have risked their lives rappelling down steep cliff faces in Hawaii, at times dangling more than 1,000 feet above ground to find rare, endangered plants that survived at remote locations away from invasive species.

They relied on helicopters and hiked for days in search of rare plant populations. Such risks on the job were showcased in a recent television documentary, “Cliff Dwellers of Kauai…and the people who hang with them.”

The advent of technology is a game-changer, decreasing these risks while opening new doors for conservation.

Since 2016, botanists at the National Tropical Botanical Garden, a nonprofit institution on Kauai, have used drones to catalog and find new populations of critically endangered species — and have successfully done so — in previously inaccessible areas.

Now there’s Mamba, a robotic arm that can collect samples of cuttings, flowers or seeds, remotely by air.

NTBG scientists, in partnership with Canadian engineers, designed the remotely controlled arm — roughly the length of a fishing rod — which collects plant samples while suspended from a drone. The arm, outfitted with eight propellers and a precise cutting mechanism, can operate remotely up to a mile away.

NTBG drone specialist Ben Nyberg calls the Mamba yet another game-changer.

“It allows us to reach critically endangered species that are down to just a few individuals,” he said. “It can be the difference between extinction and survival.”

While some botanists still rappel down cliffs to reach critically endangered plants, these technologies have opened up access to sheer, vertical cliff faces that even the best roper could not get to previously.

With the use of drones and Mamba, botanists now can scan, search, locate and safely collect plants that were previously unknown to exist.

“This combination of robotics and botany is exciting,” he said, “and is already having an amazing impact both in species conservation and the knowledge we’re gaining about cliff environments.”

Botanists can use Mamba to safely collect small amounts of live cuttings, flowers or seeds — taking only what is needed — from a specific plant, then quickly transport them back to NTBG’s Horticulture and Conservation Center for documentation, research and propagation.

Some seeds are stored in NTBG’s seed bank for conservation and research, while others go to the nursery, along with cuttings, to be cultivated and later used for restoration projects.

Mamba has provided benefits for nurseries, as well, by allowing wild cuttings to be transported more quickly and in much better condition, generally, than if retrieved by hand.

“The amount of time fragile cuttings spend under stress is minimized,” said NTBG nursery manager Rhian Campbell in a news release. “Mamba allows us to collect multiple species very efficiently in a fraction of the time it used to take.”

NTBG scientists and partners in flight trials successfully used Mamba to collect seeds and cuttings of extremely rare native species such as Lysimachia iniki and Isodendrion pyrifolium, which grow on sheer cliff faces on Kauai.

Their findings and methodology were recently published in Nature’s “Scientific Reports.”

NTBG in 2020 began working on Mamba with Outreach Robotics engineers and researchers from the University of Sherbrooke in Quebec.

For the trial flights, NTBG partnered with the state Department of Department of Land and Natural Resources Division of Forestry and Wildlife and the Plant Extinction Prevention Program.

“Mamba has exceeded our wildest expectations, turning science fiction into reality,” said DOFAW botanist Adam Williams in a statement. “Surveying and collecting from a thousand-foot-high cliff from a mile away is just mind-blowing.”

Kauai is home to more than 250 single-island endemic plant species, meaning found nowhere else on Earth, but most of them are imperiled.

Of these plant species, nearly 90% are classified as endangered or critically endangered on the Inter­national Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List. The remaining 10% are either nearly extinct or already extinct in the wild.