Plant Biodiversity Change Across Scales During the Anthropocene

Abstract

Plant communities have undergone dramatic changes in recent centuries, although not all such changes fit with the dominant biodiversity-crisis narrative used to describe them. At the global scale, future declines in plant species diversity are highly likely given habitat conversion in the tropics, although few extinctions have been documented for the Anthropocene to date (<0.1%). Nonnative species introductions have greatly increased plant species richness in many regions of the world at the same time that they have led to the creation of new hybrid polyploid species by bringing previously isolated congeners into close contact. At the local scale, conversion of primary vegetation to agriculture has decreased plant diversity, whereas other drivers of change—e.g., climate warming, habitat fragmentation, and nitrogen deposition—have highly context-dependent effects, resulting in a distribution of temporal trends with a mean close to zero. These results prompt a reassessment of how conservation goals are defined and justified.