Plant extinction excels plant speciation in the Anthropocene
- PDF / 1,228,036 Bytes
- 11 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 76 Downloads / 184 Views
REVIEW
Open Access
Plant extinction excels plant speciation in the Anthropocene Jian-Guo Gao1* , Hui Liu2, Ning Wang3, Jing Yang4 and Xiao-Ling Zhang5
Abstract Background: In the past several millenniums, we have domesticated several crop species that are crucial for human civilization, which is a symbol of significant human influence on plant evolution. A pressing question to address is if plant diversity will increase or decrease in this warming world since contradictory pieces of evidence exit of accelerating plant speciation and plant extinction in the Anthropocene. Results: Comparison may be made of the Anthropocene with the past geological times characterised by a warming climate, e.g., the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) 55.8 million years ago (Mya)—a period of “crocodiles in the Arctic”, during which plants saw accelerated speciation through autopolyploid speciation. Three accelerators of plant speciation were reasonably identified in the Anthropocene, including cities, polar regions and botanical gardens where new plant species might be accelerating formed through autopolyploid speciation and hybridization. Conclusions: However, this kind of positive effect of climate warming on new plant species formation would be thoroughly offset by direct and indirect intensive human exploitation and human disturbances that cause habitat loss, deforestation, land use change, climate change, and pollution, thus leading to higher extinction risk than speciation in the Anthropocene. At last, four research directions are proposed to deepen our understanding of how plant traits affect speciation and extinction, why we need to make good use of polar regions to study the mechanisms of dispersion and invasion, how to maximize the conservation of plant genetics, species, and diverse landscapes and ecosystems and a holistic perspective on plant speciation and extinction is needed to integrate spatiotemporally. Keywords: Anthropocene, Biodiversity, Conservation, Plant extinction, Plant speciation
Background Today, humans are the dominant animal species on Earth, and we have both a direct (dramatically changing land surfaces by settlements) [1, 2] and indirect influence on the Earth’s climate [3–5], consequently changing the physiology, behaviour, and evolution trajectories of all other organisms [6–9]. The impact of climate warming is so strong that it influences almost * Correspondence: [email protected] 1 Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences, and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University, No.5 Yiheyuan Road Haidian District, Beijing 100871, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
everything from microorganisms to plant and animal populations. Climate change accelerates plant extinction by changing their phenology, e.g., mismatching the flowering period of plants with pollinating time of insects [10, 11] and narrowing the range of physiological adaptation, thus reducing plant resistance to extreme weat
Data Loading...
