Plants in the South Pacific began losing their diversity when humans arrived on the islands

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2024-01-15 21:00

Australia; New Zealand; Pacific; International; ACT

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

The arrival of humans on the islands of the South Pacific has been linked to reduced diversity of plant species in the area for thousands of years, according to international, NZ and Australian researchers. The team looked at trends in the diversity of plant species over the past 5,000 years through fossil pollen records from 13 islands in the region, and say they found a trend of increased similarity between the species seen over time. They say this increased similarity is linked to human settlement, with more diversity in places likely to have remained untouched longer, and similar patterns in diversity seen on islands that were settled at similar times.

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Journal/
conference: Nature Ecology & Evolution

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: The Australian National University, University of Canterbury, Manaaki Whenua - Landcare Research, University of Southampton, UK

Funder: This work was supported by the Natural Environment Research Council (grant number NE/L002531/1). S.N. was supported by the European Research Council grant ERC-CoG-2021-101045309 TIME-LINES. We thank K. Richards for assistance with the pollen notations. We are grateful to authors who have contributed their pollen datasets to online repositories. We acknowledge the pioneering work by J. Flenley. We also thank the three anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.

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