According to researchers, most of the plant species will go extinct because people don't need them.
According to the paper published in the journal Plants, People, Planet, plant communities of the future will be more Homogenised than they are today.
Less than 30% of all known plant species are covered by the findings, which paint a stark picture of the threat to biodiversity.
"We're beginning to quantify what's going to make it through the Anthropocene in terms of numbers," said John. The problem is getting worse right now. I think that is part of the wake-up call that we are trying to give here. We might be able to slow it down a bit, but it is happening.
In order to understand which plant species have been most affected by humans since the start of the Anthropocene, researchers at the Smithsonian Institution created a list of plant species.
They gathered information from international databases about the different uses for the plants, whether they are crops, which are economically important to humans, or rare species that need to be protected.
They created a categorization of how the plants are faring and will fare in the future, and concluded that many more species of plants will be pushed to extinction by human activity on Earth.
There are 6,749 plants which are winners and are helpful to humans, such as corn, rice, wheat and other crops, which cover 40% of the surface of the planet, and plants which have gone extinct in the wild but are surviving in cities. Some of the plants that are winners and aren't useful to humans are the weeds such as the kudzu, which ate the south.
The magnolia tree from Haiti, which was cut down for firewood and does not grow anywhere else, is an example of a plant that is not useful to humans. cycads, the cypress family, and an ancient family of conifers called the araucariales are some of the smaller plants that are most likely to disappear completely.
The scientists said that 26,002 species were potential winners. 571 plant species have already gone extinct and are in the last two categories.
The results suggest that in the future there will be a lot less biodiversity, which in turn will drive a loss of animal diversity, and make the environment more vulnerable in the face of extreme weather, changes in climate, or more degradation due to human impact.
The authors used a dataset of 86,592 which represents 25% of the world's vascular plants, according to the assistant professor of biology at Texas A&M University.
There are other datasets that could help complete the picture and show a different pattern for winners andlosers.
Richard Corlett, a professor at the Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden who was not involved in the study, said that any plant can be saved from extinction with enough effort. That is the reason why there should be a stronger call for zero plant extinction.
How many people can name a plant that is in danger? There are no "hopeless" cases in plant preservation.
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