Study Finds Plants That Aren’t Useful to Humans Are More Likely to Face Extinction
Recent research has found that about 40% of the world’s plants are at risk of extinction. This is bad news, as plants help store carbon dioxide, offer medicinal value, provide food and shelter for animals, and play an important role in their ecosystems. A new study aimed to determine what sort of plants were most at risk, and they found that humans are a big factor.
Researchers from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History recently analyzed about 30% of the world’s vascular plant species to determine which could be considered evolutionary “winners” and “losers.” Winners are those that are directly or indirectly helped by human activities and likely to survive, while losers are plants that are apt to become ecologically irrelevant or extinct due to the same human activities. The findings, published in the journal Plants, People, Planet, show that more species could be classified as losers, and they were usually those that didn’t serve some sort of purpose for humans.
John Kress, the study’s first author and botany curator emeritus at the museum, says, “I actually started this project from a place of optimism. I had just planted all these trees around my house in Vermont and thought to myself that maybe there are actually more winners than losers, and we are just focused on everything that’s disappearing.”
To determine if this was true, Kress and Gary Krupnick, head of the museum’s plant conservation unit, began grouping the more than 86,000 vascular plants for which there was sufficient data. The other 70% of the world’s nearly 300,000 known species didn’t have comprehensive enough data for the study.
First, the duo split the plant species into winning and losing groups and then went further by splitting those up into plants that are useful to humans and those that are not. They also added categories for plants that are tentative winners or losers, neutral plants that didn’t appear to trend either way, and those that had already gone extinct.
To group them, they focused on databases including endangered plant species, economically significant species like crops, invasive plants and weeds, and endangered plants involved in global trade.
Once they finished, the team had designated 20,293 species of losers, the vast majority of which were deemed of no use to humans. Meanwhile, there were just 6,913 winners, all but 164 of which were categorized as useful to humans. When it came to tentative winners and losers, there was more bad news. Tentative losers outnumbered tentative winners 26,002 to 18,664.
Kress says this is concerning, as the loss of plant biodiversity can impact animal biodiversity. It can also weaken ecosystems.
He adds, “The list of winners shows that we’ve selected certain species that are useful to us, but as that pool of plants we have to select from decreases in the future, humanity will have many fewer options when we want to reforest the planet, find new medicines or foods, or develop new products.”
Kress hopes that these findings will help other scientists investigate why certain plants are winning and losing in the age of humans and which plants require the most protection. He also says this study should be a wake up call.
