title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada; email: mark.vellend@usherbrooke.ca.
authors.forename: Mark
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vellend
authors.affiliation: Forest and Nature Lab, Department of Forest and Water Management, Ghent University, BE-9090 Melle-Gontrode, Belgium.
authors.forename: Lander
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Baeten
authors.affiliation: Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada; email: mark.vellend@usherbrooke.ca.
authors.forename: Antoine
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Becker-Scarpitta
authors.affiliation: Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada; email: mark.vellend@usherbrooke.ca.
authors.forename: Véronique
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Boucher-Lalonde
authors.affiliation: Department of Integrative Biology, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada.
authors.forename: Jenny L
authors.initials: JL
authors.lastname: McCune
authors.affiliation: Département de Biologie, Université de Sherbrooke, Sherbrooke, Québec J1K 2R1, Canada; email: mark.vellend@usherbrooke.ca.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Messier
authors.affiliation: School of GeoSciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH9 3FF, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Isla H
authors.initials: IH
authors.lastname: Myers-Smith
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912.
authors.forename: Dov F
authors.initials: DF
authors.lastname: Sax
mesh_terms: D000383:Agriculture; D000818:Animals; D044822:Biodiversity; D057231:Climate Change; D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D017753:Ecosystem; D053476:Extinction, Biological; D049810:Genetic Speciation; D058865:Introduced Species; D009584:Nitrogen / Q000378:metabolism / Q000502:physiology; D010944:Plants
chemical_list: D009584:Nitrogen
keywords: biodiversity; climate change; habitat fragmentation; land use; nitrogen deposition; scale