Plant Atlas 2020

That the Parliament welcomes the publication of Plant Atlas 2020 by the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), which it understands is the most powerful statement ever produced on the state of wild and naturalised plants and an extraordinary achievement for biodiversity mapping and change detection; celebrates the remarkable work of thousands of volunteer recorders who spent 20 years collecting data on changes in the British and Irish flora, completing a staggering 178,000 recording days and submitting over 26 million plant records towards this project; expresses deep concern at the findings in Plant Atlas 2020 relating to Scotland, where, it understands, nearly half of all native plant species have declined in distribution since 1960, and two thirds of ancient arable wildflowers have also declined; understands that the drivers of these declines include climate change, which poses a particular risk to the survival of some of Scotland’s rare arctic-alpine plants, habitat loss, agricultural intensification, overgrazing, pollution and the impacts of invasive non-native species; further understands that the key role played by plants in ecosystems means that everyone needs to place plant species recovery at the heart of nature conservation in order to tackle the biodiversity crisis, and considers that Plant Atlas 2020 can play an important role in supporting the delivery of Scotland’s ambition to become Nature Positive by 2030 and to have restored and regenerated biodiversity by 2045, delivering, it believes, lasting outcomes for the natural environment to benefit the people of Scotland for generations to come.