Extinction risk and threats to plants and fungi

Abstract

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Molecules from nature: Reconciling biodiversity conservation and global healthcare imperatives for sustainable use of medicinal plants and fungi

“…This highlights the importance of fungal biobanks and the need for their more systematic use to preserve fungal biodiversity. Many more medicinal plants have been assessed, reflecting the more extensive medicinal use of plants globally and the significant challenges in assessing fungi (Nic Lughadha et al., 2020). Of the 25,906 plant species with documented medicinal use (MPNS, 2020), all species that are not hybrids were analysed (WCVP, 2020), leaving 25,791 species remaining for analysis.…”

International collaboration between collections‐based institutes for halting biodiversity loss and unlocking the useful properties of plants and fungi

“…Significant progress has been made in aggregating globally dispersed occurrence data sets of both plants and fungi, most notably the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF Secretariat, 2019). This aggregation provides the bedrock for our exploration and understanding of plant and fungal diversity (Antonelli, Smith, & Simmonds, 2019; Bakker et al., 2020; James et al, 2018) and is a vital data resource to ensure conservation interventions are keeping pace with the increasing rate of species loss (Nic Lughadha et al., 2020). New global conservation targets have been proposed based on keeping the number of recorded extinctions of described species to less than 20 per year (Rounsevell et al., 2020).…”

Botanical Monography in the Anthropocene

“…An important step to achieve these goals is integrating new data more efficiently, starting with a phylogenetic framework. We propose the following criteria to guide the selection of plant groups in most urgent need of monographic study: (i) Major knowledge gaps: large groups that have not been monographed in the past c. 150 years (e.g., the genus Croton in Euphorbiaceae, with >1000 species xiv ) and include many species that cannot be evaluated for extinction risk due to taxonomic complexity limiting the allocation of species names; (ii) threatened: groups considered to be at high risk of extinction, or including both threatened and non-threatened species that are difficult to identify, are rare, or in urgent need of conservation assessment (e.g., the orchid family Orchidaceae, especially south-east Asian groups, such as Vanda [57]); (iii) valuable: groups that benefit ecosystems or humanity, identified by indicators such as a high proportion of crop wild relatives or rainforest tree species, as well as species of ecological, economic or cultural value, nitrogen fixation, carbon storage, or climate change resilience. For instance, a comprehensive monograph is needed for the legume tribe Phaseoleae, which includes the many crop wild relatives of cultivated beans (Phaseolus); (iv) morphologically or functionally unusual: groups that represent rare and extreme combinations of functional traits, at the fringes of the global spectrum of plant form and function [58], could illuminate potentially valuable adaptations to environmental change.…”