Medicinal plants threatened by changing climates

An article (full text here) warning that climate change is affecting medicinal and aromatic plants around the world and could ultimately lead to losses of some key species, was recently published in HerbalGram the journal of the American Botanical Council.

The authors note that species endemic to regions or ecosystems that are especially vulnerable to climate change, such as alpine regions, could be most at risk. “After polar regions, alpine areas are changing faster than any other areas on Earth,” said Jan Salick, PhD, senior curator of ethnobotany at the Missouri Botanical Garden. “Alpine areas are very important for Tibetan doctors’ use,” explained Dr. Salick. “They traditionally spend a month each year going into the mountains to collect plants. A lot of their medicines come from the mountains.” Therefore, if climatic conditions change in these areas, there is high probability that traditional medicines will also suffer due to the difficulty in cultivating these species as each have niche micro-climate demands.

“As research is emerging on the effects of climate on vegetation in general, there continues to be a dearth of information on medicinal (economic) plants,” said Dr. Patricia DeAngelis, botanist at the US Fish and Wildlife Service and chair of the Plant Conservation Alliance—Medicinal Plant Working Group.

Medicinal Plants covered extensively by the CAB Abstracts database and the CABI book programme. Currently we have over 95,000 records for "medicinal plants" on the database. 

Another paper that is worth a read on this subject area is:
Klein, J. A., Harte, J., Zhao XinQuan (2008) Decline in medicinal and forage species with warming is mediated by plant traits on the Tibetan Plateau. Ecosystems, 11 (5), pp. 775-789.

Picture: Cloudberry Rubus chamaemorus ©2009 Alain Cuerrier

Comments

[Shirin Jindal]

I liked the content on this site. Would like to visit again. http://www.chennaiflowerplaza.com

[Indian medicinal Plants ; Ayurveda]

details about medicinal plants s good

[Juliana Gardener]

Great post, it was very interesting and had a ton of points that I loved! I had a feeling our environment would be comming to more and more things like this. The loss of plants is a sad thing, I love every species on the Earth. Anyways, I just found your blog and already I love it. I have bookmarked it and will be back soon, I look forward to reading some interesting upcoming posts. Thanks!

[pc games]

Thanks for such a great post and the review, I am totally impressed! Keep stuff like this coming.