The future of plant extinction

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By Rosa A. Scherson and Federico Luebert, Science. 

Excerpt: Climate change is reshaping the environmental conditions that plants must face and accelerating their extinction. Estimating how endangered plants are is important to inform conservation decisions. However, only 18% of plants are included in the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species, which provides global assessments of the risk of extinction for 76,864 plant species (2). ...Although Forest et al. and Wang et al. used different scales of time and space and studied different (but largely overlapping) groups of plants, both studies revealed that plant extinctions do not occur randomly across geographical areas. For example, Forest et al. reported that angiosperm [flowering] species at high extinction risk are concentrated in tropical regions and islands, such as Madagascar, Borneo, and Ecuador. Furthermore, Wang et al. found that vascular plant species in temperate Mediterranean forests and certain Southwest and East Australian regions are more likely to become extinct because of climate change compared with plants in other regions. These findings reveal that the areas of the world at the highest risk of plant diversity loss are also biodiversity hotspots (9) or centers of plant diversity (10).... 

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