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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: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 19 2019, @01:13AM (1 child)
Perhaps they just overestimated it or their expectations were just wrong. Are those somehow not valid options anymore?
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @03:14AM
Those are valid options. They're just not the case here.
Are you familiar with the phrase "astronomical odds"? It means that, while something isn't physically impossible, the expected number of times it might happen during the lifetime of the universe are lower than one.
If you look at this study's data, it's extremely cleanly curated. It turns out there's an entire field of botany devoted to classifying plants, in part because scientists like to "be on the record" and naming a new plant is one way to do that. So there's been dozens to thousands of reviews of most of the 350-ish "extinction" datapoints, and a very solid base of data from the 19th century, which is not the case for every field of science.
So the data is very reliable.
Could expectations have been wrong? Yes... easily within 4%, possibly within 10%. Unlikely a 50% error. The 50,000% discrepancy is not quite astronomically unlikely but the conclusion is very, very, very unlikely to be categorically incorrect.
Soooomething (and they don't say what - or who!) is causing a mass plant extinction.