The interplay of environmental conditions and geographical barriers such as mountains and lakes determine where plants thrive – an international study shows how these patterns have developed over millions of years. Credit: Holger Kreft
By University of Göttingen March 31, 2025
Global research team explores how environmental factors and dispersal barriers influence biodiversity.
Why do certain plants flourish in some regions but not in others? A study led by researchers at the University of Göttingen sheds light on the factors that determine where plants grow and how these patterns have evolved over millions of years.
The team analyzed data from nearly 270,000 seed plant species across the globe. Their findings, published in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reveal that both environmental conditions and natural barriers to movement, such as mountains, oceans, and climate zones, play key roles in shaping global plant diversity.
To uncover these patterns, the researchers used advanced techniques that combine current plant distribution data with information about evolutionary relationships between species. They also incorporated modern environmental data and reconstructed Earth’s past climate and geography to understand how these factors have influenced plant distributions through deep time.
The team examined how variations in climate, soil, and other environmental factors determine where plants can thrive and how physical barriers – such as oceans, mountain ranges, and areas with inhospitable climates – restrict plant dispersal.
Environment and Barriers
The findings show that environmental conditions, particularly climate, are important factors in shaping plant distributions, with their influence remaining consistent across evolutionary timescales.
Physical barriers like oceans and mountains played a significant role in limiting the spread of more recently evolved plant groups but had a much smaller effect on ancient plant groups, which have had longer periods to disperse widely. Past tectonic plate positions and movements, reconstructed from geological data, were found to have only a modest impact on plant diversity, with their strongest effects occurring between 20 and 50 million years ago.
“These findings reveal a fundamental process in nature,” says Dr Lirong Cai from the University of Göttingen and the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv). “Given enough time, plants can overcome the barriers of vast distances and geography, but they often remain limited by the environments they encounter.”
Reference: “Environmental filtering, not dispersal history, explains global patterns of phylogenetic turnover in seed plants at deep evolutionary timescales” by Lirong Cai, Holger Kreft, Pierre Denelle, Amanda Taylor, Dylan Craven, Wayne Dawson, Franz Essl, Mark van Kleunen, Jan Pergl, Petr Pyšek, Marten Winter, Francisco J. Cabezas, Viktoria Wagner, Pieter B. Pelser, Jan J. Wieringa and Patrick Weigelt, 29 November 2024, Nature Ecology & Evolution.
DOI: 10.1038/s41559-024-02599-y