Plants and their contributions to people are insufficiently protected globally

Plants and their contributions to people are insufficiently protected globally - UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre

In ground-breaking research published in the journal Science today (Friday 19 January), scientists at the UN Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC) and the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG), Kew, reveal the global distribution of more than 35,000 plant species used by people.

Analysis of the first-ever global map of the diversity and rarity of plant species with documented uses by people has found that:

The highest concentrations of utilised plants are in the Tropics, where there is higher overall biodiversity and human cultural diversity. These “biocultural hotspots” should be priority areas for conservation.
Regions with high concentrations of utilised plant species are largely unprotected.
Conservation planning and implementation needs to better integrate people-plant interactions to fulfil the aims of the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and for people and biodiversity to thrive sustainably in the future.

global map coloured to show the global distribution of plants used by humans — The global richness of plant species with known uses by humans. Dark green areas are likely to contain a high number of plant species used by people, whereas dark purple areas likely contain fewer species with known uses. Image: Science, ‘The global distribution of plants used by humans’

The research from experts at UNEP-WCMC and RBG, Kew, together with a group of academic partners including the universities of Oxford and Gothenburg, for the first time quantifies and models the global distribution of plants used by humans.

The team investigated the distribution of 35,687 plant species with documented uses by people, spanning 10 categories, including human food and animal fodder, materials, fuels and medicines. These ranged from widely cultivated crops to rare plants harvested from the wild. The analysis used more than 11 million observations of plant species recorded by botanists from around the world and cutting-edge machine-learning algorithms to predict the geographic distribution of utilised plant species and their rarity.