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https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01810-6
The world’s seed-bearing plants have been disappearing at a rate of nearly 3 species a year since 1900 ― which is up to 500 times higher than would be expected as a result of natural forces alone, according to the largest survey yet of plant extinctions.
The project looked at more than 330,000 species and found that plants on islands and in the tropics were the most likely to be declared extinct. Trees, shrubs and other woody perennials had the highest probability of disappearing regardless of where they were located. The results were published on 10 June in Nature Ecology & Evolution1.
[...]The work stems from a database compiled by botanist Rafaël Govaerts at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London. Govaerts started the database in 1988 to track the status of every known plant species. As part of that project, he mined the scientific literature and created a list of seed-bearing plant species that were ruled extinct, and noted which species scientists had deemed to be extinct but were later rediscovered.
[...]The researchers found that about 1,234 species had been reported extinct since the publication of Carl Linnaeus’s compendium of plant species, Species Plantarum, in 1753. But more than half of those species were either rediscovered or reclassified as another living species, meaning 571 are still presumed extinct.
[...]Even though the researchers carefully curated the plant extinction database, the study’s numbers are almost certainly an underestimate of the problem, says Jurriaan de Vos, a phylogeneticist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Some plant species are “functionally extinct”, he notes, and are present only in botanical gardens or in such small numbers in the wild that researchers don’t expect the population to survive.
“You can decimate a population or reduce a population of a thousand down to one and the thing is still not extinct,” says de Vos. “But it doesn’t mean that it’s all ok.”
[1] Humphreys, A. M. et al. Nature Ecol. Evol. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-019-0906-2 (2019).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 19 2019, @12:50AM (3 children)
I wonder if our lawn care fetish has made the world a lot more hostile to those kinds of plants. Perennials and woody plants probably don't do well in places that are mowed every week.
Then there are all these herbicides for targeting broad leaf plants.
Suburban sprawl with giant parking lots can't be good either. In addition to covering lots of fertile ground, they mess with the ecology of all the nearby streams by magnifying flooding and erosion. One stupid thing builders sometimes still do is straighten out creeks, to make more room for housing lots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:10AM
Or razing forests to create farmland? Or maybe it's just fake news?
It's 50-50, so let's teach the controversy.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @02:15PM (1 child)
My front garden, By numbers of different species as of last year.
Trees: 7
Shrubs: 15
Perrenials: 18+
Annuals: 9
Grass: maybe...
Weeds: fuck knows...
Fungi: 11 identified, 5 unidentified.
Neighbour one side
Grass, and fuck all else..
Neighbour the other side
nothing, nada, zilch.
Fucking parking lot, he paved the garden over
As my sister sings when she visits us and looks at our garden
"Welcome to the jungle..."
Fuck Lawn monoculture.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 19 2019, @10:02PM
Are the neighbors with the paved yard trying to make sure they are never cited for violating lawn care ordinances?