Publication details
State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2023
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Popularization text |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | What grows where? Knowledge about where to find particular species in nature must have been key to the survival of humans throughout our evolution. Over time, and as people colonised new land masses and habitats, interactions with the local biota led to a wealth of combined traditional and scientific wisdom about the distributions of species and their many uses. Fast-forward to the present day, and much of our current scientific knowledge of global plant and fungal diversity comes from specimens hosted by the world’s herbaria and fungaria, of which there are more than 3,000. But despite this wealth of knowledge and collections, one might be surprised to learn that, to date, we have not been able to answer one of the most fundamental questions in plant and fungal diversity with confidence – namely, how many species are there globally and in different parts of the world? The consequences of our insufficient knowledge on biodiversity and distribution are manifold. Scientists may have drawn biased – or possibly even incorrect – conclusions on the patterns and underlying drivers of diversity. Beyond the impacts of knowledge gaps and inaccuracies on efforts to answer fundamental scientific questions, there are serious implications for conservation given that several targets in the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, such as those related to protecting and restoring biodiverse habitats, rely on having robust biodiversity data. To tackle this challenge, this fifth edition of State of the World’s Plants and Fungi, from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew (RBG Kew), focuses on the latest knowledge on the diversity and geographical distribution of plants and fungi. It relies on two major advances. The first is the release of the World Checklist of Vascular Plants complete with geographical distributions for all known species – a landmark achievement, led by RBG Kew’s Rafaël Govaerts, which took more than 35 years of meticulous and highly collaborative work. And the second is the extraction of a wealth of new information on fungal diversity from analyses of environmental DNA in soil samples across the world, combined with morphological and molecular evidence from fungarium specimens. In the following chapters, we present compelling stories demonstrating what we have learned from these and related sources of data, and how this understanding can help us foster future research and conservation. This report is based on groundbreaking research papers from many international teams of scientists. They are co-released in a collection of open-access articles titled ‘Global Plant Diversity and Distribution’ from the journals New Phytologist and Plants, People, Planet, and a review of global fungal diversity in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources. We are grateful to the Sfumato Foundation for financial support, the journals’ editorial boards, the expert reviewers, and all authors and other contributors to this important, timely and fruitful collaboration. Just as our early ancestors needed to know what grows where for their own survival, so plants and fungi need us to know where they grow – to enable us to safeguard their continued existence for generations to come. |