OREANDA-NEWS. In 2011, paleontologist Anthony Barnoski and his colleagues at the University of California at Berkeley published an article that told about the sixth mass extinction that has been going on for the past 500 years - a process in which three quarters of species disappear over a geological period. Scientists compared the average extinction rate of species from the XVI to the XXI century and compared with the average speed of this process in other periods of history.

The cause of extinction has become human activity - people destroy the usual habitat of animals and plants, which leads to a reduction in biodiversity. Probably, this process has a greater impact on plants. Unlike animals, they cannot move when their habitat is destroyed.

Earlier, the press published studies of an international group of scientists who claim that in two and a half hundred years our planet has lost at least 570 plant species.