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MACROEVOLUTION

Useful plants have deep evolutionary roots

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 5, pages 558–559 (2021)Cite this article

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It has long been asserted that samples of taxa that span more of the Tree of Life contain more features that humans find useful. This has now been tested at a global scale: across 13,500 plant genera and nearly 9,500 uses, the prediction holds, supporting a macroevolutionary perspective on biodiversity conservation.

Nature is very important. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES)1 recently organized nature’s benefits (termed ‘Nature’s Contributions to People’ (NCP)) into 18 broad categories that recognize human society’s dependence on material (for example, food and shelter), non-material (for example, recreation and spiritual) and regulating (ecosystem functions) benefits from biodiversity. Without conservation attention, many of these benefits, including pollination services, products for medicine, learning, inspiration and many more may be at risk. But our ability to conserve them is limited by an incomplete understanding of how biodiversity currently benefits people. More troubling, extinctions might also deprive us of unidentified benefits. These include benefits we could make use of now, if we knew more about the species around us, and uses that might only be identified in the future. How can conservation actions identify and guard against these losses? Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Molina-Venegas et al.2 find that maximizing evolutionary history captures substantially more of our current uses of plants than does random selection of taxa, supporting an evolution-centred approach to conservation.

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Fig. 1: How maximizing evolutionary history captures more uses.

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Arne Mooers, Caroline M. Tucker.

Affiliations

  1. Biological Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada

    Arne Mooers

  2. Environment, Ecology and Energy Program, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC, USA

    Caroline M. Tucker

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  1. Arne Mooers
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  2. Caroline M. Tucker
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Correspondence to Arne Mooers or Caroline M. Tucker.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Mooers, A., Tucker, C.M. Useful plants have deep evolutionary roots. Nat Ecol Evol 5, 558–559 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01438-8

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