Plant Extinction vs. Plant Speciation in the Anthropocene

Following my last post, “Let’s drink up this glass of species wine!” (https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/posts/64847-let-s-drink-up-this-glass-of-species-wine), we successfully published that opinion/perspective article in a decent journal BMC Plant Biology: https://bmcplantbiol.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12870-020-02646-3

These days, more and more people are concerned about the increased plant diversity somewhere in the world. Meanwhile, we are on the age of the “sixth mass extinction”, both have lots of evidence. However, I found all the questions could not be addressed in one paper, thus I want to contribute one Review article on this topic: plant speciation vs. extinction in the Anthropocene.

In this Review article, we clarified the mechanisms of speciation and extinction, where the plant speciation occurs and why we will lose more plant species in this and the following centuries. In which areas on the Earth are easier to form new plant species? What are the current ways of plant extinction? In the context of climate change, is plant speciation more dominant than plant extinction? (Fig. 1) At last, we gave four insightful research directions. These are fundamental questions in plant science and sustainability research, which need a critical and thorough review. We believe, the timely publication of such a review article would be a great thing for the plants’ conservation.

Remarkably, we have cited 150 papers in this review which have a very large research dimension, including evolution, ecology, plant biology, climate change and paleobotany and etc. I am so happy to read these exciting research articles, reviews and perspectives that laid a solid foundation (truth, evidence and opinions etc.) for our review article. Just like “stand on the shoulders of giants”, probably, the most thanked people are the authors of those cited literatures in the text.

Fig. 1. A simplified conceptual model depicting the types of plant speciation and the drivers of plant extinction in the Anthropocene. Three identified plant speciation accelerators, i.e., cities, polar regions, and botanical gardens are illustrated to show how climate warming might change plant evolution in the future. The contribution to plant speciation displayed from the top to bottom are: autopolyploid speciation, allopolyploid speciation, and chromosomal rearrangements. The main drivers of plant extinction displayed from left to right are: habitat loss, deforestation, land use change, climate change, and pollution. The solid lines denote the biological and ecological processes of plant speciation and extinction, in which the green ones denote the corresponding speciation types, and the red ones denote the five drivers of plant extinction. The thickness of the arrow denotes the relative strength of the contributions. It should be noted that climate change accelerates plant speciation while drives plant extinction either, and human population increase as the primary driver of plant extinction. Both new plant species and their progenitors of plant species may face the same extinction risk in the Anthropocene, but the new plant species are more likely to survive due to their stronger natural adaptability to climate change.

Reference

Gao, J.G., Liu, H., Wang, N., Yang, J. & Zhang, X.-L. (2020) Plant extinction excels plant speciation in the Anthropocene. BMC Plant Biology 20: 430. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-020-02646-3