Natural History Wanderings

from University and Jepson Herbaria – UC Berkeley

A baseline for monitoring extinction in the Anthropocene. Jepson Curator Bruce Baldwin and UC/JEPS Director Brent Mishler contributed to an analysis documenting which plants in North America have already gone extinct. Available data suggest 65 vascular plant taxa from this region have become extinct since European settlement, 19 from California alone.

Extinction rates are expected to increase during the Anthropocene. Current extinction rates of plants and many animals remain unknown. This study represents the first effort to quantify extinctions among the vascular flora of North America north of Mexico since European settlement.

Read the open source paper here: https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/…/10…/cobi.13621