Hi Josh McMeekin,
I assume your botanical names are like this: "Quercus robur" right? I used split to split the botanical name into a list of characters (words in this case) found between spaces, and then grabbed the first word because indexes start at 0 (the [0]) and then Decode to find the string that you want associated with that word. The last line, 'Low Risk', is the default in case none of the others are found to be a match.
var firstword = Split($feature.name, " ")[0]
return Decode(firstword,
'Quercus','High Risk',
'Acer','High Risk',
'Picea','High Risk',
'Betula','Medium Risk',
'Fagus','Medium Risk',
'Salix','Medium Risk',
'Juglans','Medium Risk',
'Gleditsia','Medium Risk',
'Malus','Medium Risk',
'Prunus', 'Medium Risk',
'Low Risk')
More information:
Decode: Logical Functions | ArcGIS for Developers
Split: Text Functions | ArcGIS for Developers
Let me know how that works for you!