Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

posted by martyb on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:13PM   Printer-friendly
from the seeds-of-change? dept.

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).


Original Submission

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:02AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:02AM (#857366)

    Enlighten us. Go on, chop-chop.