More 'Losers' Than 'Winners' Among Plants in the Age of Humans
Published:13 Mar.2022 Source:Smithsonian
A new analysis spanning more than 86,000 plant species from John Kress, botany curator emeritus at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, and Gary Krupnick, head of the museum's plant conservation unit, finds that on this human-dominated planet, many more species of plants are poised to "lose" rather than "win." The study was published today, March 10, in the journal Plants, People, Planet.
From changing Earth's climate to destroying, degrading and altering ecosystems on a massive scale, human choices now largely dictate the environmental conditions across much of the globe and, as a result, which species of plants and animals can survive and persist and which will go extinct. Species lucky enough to be directly or indirectly aided by human activities are likely to survive and can be thought of as "winners," while those that are pushed to ecological irrelevance or extinction by those same activities are the ultimate "losers" in evolutionary terms.