First report of all the world’s plants finds 1 in 5 species facing extinction

By Ben Guarino | The Washington Post | May 10, 2016

Plants pervade almost every part of human life — not only do we eat them and wear them, we use plants for fuel, medicine, building materials, poisons and intoxicants.

To limit the world’s plants to those that meet a human need, however, would be doing the leafy kingdom a disservice. In fact, according to a new report from the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, in the United Kingdom, only a slice of plant life is “useful” to humans. In what Kew is calling the first comprehensive assessment of plant life —  the first annual “State of the World’s Plants” — researchers determined that some 30,000 plant species had a documented use.

Read more on The Washington Post.