Abstract
Humanity faces the challenge of conserving the attributes of biodiversity that may be essential to secure human wellbeing. Among all the organisms that are beneficial to humans, plants stand out as the most important providers of natural resources. Therefore, identifying plant uses is critical to preserve the beneficial potential of biodiversity and to promote basic and applied research on the relationship between plants and humans. However, much of this information is often uncritical, contradictory, of dubious value or simply not readily accessible to the great majority of scientists and policy makers. Here, we compiled a genus-level dataset of plant-use records for all accepted vascular plant taxa (13489 genera) using the information gathered in the 4th Edition of Mabberley's plant-book, the most comprehensive global review of plant classification and their uses published to date. From 1974 to 2017 all the information was systematically gathered, evaluated, and synthesized by David Mabberley, who reviewed over 1000 botanical sources including modern Floras, monographs, periodicals, handbooks, and authoritative websites. Plant uses were arranged across 28 standard categories of use following the Economic Botany Data Collection Standard guidelines, which resulted in a binary classification of 9478 plant-use records pertaining human and animal nutrition, materials, fuels, medicine, poisons, social and environmental uses. Of all the taxa included in the dataset, 33% were assigned to at least one category of use, the most common being "ornamental" (26%), "medicine" (16%), "human food" (13%) and "timber" (8%). In addition to a readily available binary matrix for quantitative analyses, we provide a control text matrix that links the former to the description of the uses in Mabberley's plant-book. We hope this dataset will serve to establish synergies between scientists and policy makers interested in plant-human interactions and to move towards the complete compilation and classification of the nature's contributions to people upon which the wellbeing of future generations may depend.
Highlights
Following our failure to fully achieve the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets included in the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 [1], nations are working together in developing the post2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), an ambitious initiative that will serve as a springboard to prospect the 2050 vision of “living in harmony with nature” [2]
The retrieval of plant use information from Mabberley’s plant-book and its arrangement as a readily available matrix for quantitative analyses is a major step towards achieving these goals and will help to advance scientific knowledge in a botanical discipline that is gaining momentum [18]
A recent study drew on this database to show that phylogenetic diversity can efficiently capture plant services [11], supporting a promising macroevolutionary perspective on biodiversity conservation [19]
Summary
Following our failure to fully achieve the 20 Aichi biodiversity targets included in the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011–2020 [1], nations are working together in developing the post2020 Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF), an ambitious initiative that will serve as a springboard to prospect the 2050 vision of “living in harmony with nature” [2]. Recognizing all the human benefits that are directly provided by biodiversity is one of the main goals of the post2020 GBF [3], which aspires to unlock these natural resources and promote basic and applied research on the relationship between humans and the rest of nature [4]. Among all the organisms that are beneficial to humans, plants stand out as the most important providers of natural services, including basic resources and psychological needs [8], and they are often preferred in research projects that lay at the crossroads of biodiversity and human societies [9,10,11]. Much of the information on the ethnobotanical and economic use of plants is very sparse and often uncritical, contradictory, of dubious value, or not readily accessible to the great majority of scientists and policy makers. While ethnobotanists have paid great attention to elaborate disparate classifications of plant benefits [12,13], the use of generalizable classification schemes such as the Economic Botany Data Collection Standard [14] is still rare (but see [9,11])
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