BEEP · Biodiversity Erosion in European medicinal Plants

Biodiversity Erosion in European medicinal Plants

Europe hosts a great diversity of wild species, many of which are unique to the continent. However, human-induced environmental change rapidly erodes Europe’s biodiversity, resulting in irreversible loss of valuable resources both for ecosystem functions and for human well-being. The main drivers of this loss include land-use change, over-exploitation and climate change, contributing cumulatively to species extinction. Despite the monitoring efforts put forth by many global and European conservation bodies, we still have limited understanding of the mechanisms underlying the responses of threatened populations to anthropogenic pressure. Threat status assessments under the Red List criteria of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) rely mainly on temporal estimations of population sizes and species geographical ranges but overlook a major evolutionary mechanism that numerous conservation experts have now argued is critical for safeguarding biodiversity, i.e. the temporal variation in genetic diversity. Although this mechanism both determines and reflects species evolutionary responses to environmental pressure, incorporating it into conservation planning has been challenging due to lack of affordable technology, lack of interdisciplinarity, and gaps in the transfer of fundamental research to end-user conservation application. BEEP addresses these gaps by combining modern and affordable sequencing technologies for quantifying the magnitude of species genomic erosion, with earth observation and climate data for assessing the degree of the corresponding environmental change. By bridging diverse technological fields and scientific principles, BEEP provides an applied conservation tool for assessing extinction risk in wild populations in response to current and future anthropogenic pressure. I am showcasing the power and importance of this approach using threatened medicinal plants of the genus Sideritis (mountain tea or Ironwort), that are of significant conservation interest with regard to the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals on good health (Goal 3) and life on land (Goal 15). To achieve its goals, BEEP set two main objectives: 1) assess the extent of temporal genomic erosion during the last decades in three threatened medicinal herbs of mountain tea and 2) estimate temporal environmental change and predict the associated magnitude of genomic erosion in the mountain tea populations. Each objective was designed to be fulfilled through a work package (described below) and to contribute to my scientific training in the respective field.

Data: CORDIS, © European Union