Applications in Plant Sciences最新文献

Evolution has generated an extraordinary diversity of life on Earth that drives the function of natural ecosystems (Xu et al., 2020), human cultures (Clark et al., 2014), and economies (Hanley and Perrings, 2019; Paul et al., 2020). Plants are the most dominant life form on Earth (Bar-On et al., 2018) and the decline of plant diversity has caused drastic shifts in natural ecosystems (Pugnaire et al., 2019), resulting in a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars (USD) per year from the global economy (Austin et al., 2020; Diagne et al., 2021). Plant species face unprecedented challenges to their survival, growth, and reproduction due to numerous threats, including anthropogenic factors such as land-use change, habitat destruction, climate change, and illegal poaching (IUCN, 2023). The most urgent threats vary by region and species; thus, addressing individual threats to species survival worldwide will require broad knowledge of plant organismal function, ecology, and evolution and the creation of innovative, targeted tools and applications. This special issue features new techniques and approaches across multiple disciplines (from molecules to ecosystems) and scales of inquiry (from individual plants to global perspectives), with a central focus on the development and dissemination of new methods and perspectives in conservation biology.

Conservation biologists and practitioners around the globe are conducting research and enacting policies to conserve and preserve plant diversity at the local and regional scales. One primary obstacle to the conservation of plant diversity at larger scales has been the lack of tools that directly aid the coordination of research efforts and knowledge from around the world. Linsky et al. (2024) present a new collaborative framework called the Global Conservation Consortia (GCC). Under this framework, researchers and practitioners are united by a shared focus on a specific ecological or taxonomic group (e.g., trees, cycads, magnolias, oaks) to develop comprehensive conservation action plans that scaffold efforts across local, regional, and global scales. While gathering and collating data from around the globe has historically been a challenge, a new tool hosted by the Botanic Gardens Conservation International (BGCI), reported here by Quintana et al. (2024), aims to close knowledge gaps on the conservation status of threatened tree species across regions, increase collaboration, and provide information to decision-makers. The Conservation Action Tracker, part of the GlobalTree Portal, gathers information about the current status of threatened species, action/recovery plans, ex situ collections, species protections, and policy and outreach programs. This online database is freely available so that it can be used to guide conservation efforts and monitor their success

The 2020 State of the World's Plants and Fungi report revealed that two in five plant species are threatened with extinction. Despite their diverse ecosystem services and myriad human uses, plants receive a fraction of the conservation resources directed at animal taxa. Several existing frameworks—including International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Specialist Groups, the American Public Gardens Association Plant Collections Network, and the Center for Plant Conservation National Collection of Endangered Plants—have spurred conservation action, but there remains an urgent need to scale up conservation efforts for the world's plants. Here, a new approach to coordinated conservation action for plant taxa is described: the Global Conservation Consortia (GCC). GCC catalyze institutions and experts to collaboratively develop and implement comprehensive strategies to prevent extinction of threatened plant groups. This review focuses on three tree-focused, U.S.-led consortia: cycads, magnolias, and oaks, but the GCC framework is applicable to other taxonomic groups. This review covers consortia design and implementation, provides conservation action case studies, and shares preliminary successes and challenges as this new and exciting approach to conservation is developed.

Phylogenetic inference of polyploid species is the first step towards understanding their patterns of diversification. In this paper, we review the challenges and limitations of inferring species relationships of polyploid plants using traditional phylogenetic sequencing approaches, as well as the mischaracterization of the species tree from single or multiple gene trees. We provide a roadmap to infer interspecific relationships among polyploid lineages by comparing and evaluating the application of current phylogenetic, phylogenomic, transcriptomic, and whole-genome approaches using different sequencing platforms. For polyploid species tree reconstruction, we assess the following criteria: (1) the amount of prior information or tools required to capture the genetic region(s) of interest; (2) the probability of recovering homeologs for polyploid species; and (3) the time efficiency of downstream data analysis. Moreover, we discuss bioinformatic pipelines that can reconstruct networks of polyploid species relationships. In summary, although current phylogenomic approaches have improved our understanding of reticulate species relationships in polyploid-rich genera, the difficulties of recovering reliable orthologous genes and sorting all homeologous copies for allopolyploids remain a challenge. In the future, assembled long-read sequencing data will assist the recovery and identification of multiple gene copies, which can be particularly useful for reconstructing the multiple independent origins of polyploids.