Plants Humans Don’t Need Are Heading for Extinction, Study Finds

Researchers have categorised more than 80,000 plant species worldwide and found that most of them will “lose” in the face of humanity — going extinct because people don’t need them.

This means that plant communities of the future will be hugely more homogenised than those of today, according to the paper published in the journal Plants, People, Planet. The findings, which paint a stark picture of the threat to biodiversity, cover less than 30% of all known plant species, and as such are a “wake-up call,” say the researchers, highlighting the need for more work in this field. “We’re actually beginning to quantify what’s going to make it through the bottleneck of the Anthropocene, in terms of numbers,” said John Kress, botany curator emeritus at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and lead author of the paper. “It’s not the future, it’s happening. The bottleneck is starting to happen right now. And I think that’s part of the wake-up call that we are trying to give here. It’s something we might be able to slow down a little bit, but it’s happening.”