The research frontiers on plant geography under global change: Patterns, processes, and mechanisms

• Published in: Geographical Research Bulletin Vol. 4; pp. 469 - 472
• Main Authors: Wang, Zeqing, Lin, Huiying, Pan, Yingting
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English; Japanese
• Published: Resources Economics Research Board 12.07.2025
• Subjects: biodiversity patterns; functional traits; global change; phylogeographic evolution; plant geography
• ISSN: 2758-1446
• DOI: 10.50908/grb.4.0_469

As a vital branch of physical geography, plant geography focuses on the reciprocal interactions between vegetation and geographic environments as well as their spatiotemporal evolution, playing a crucial role in understanding the distribution patterns of global biodiversity and the adaptive evolution of ecosystems. This paper reviews several key frontier areas in current plant geography research, including multi-scale patterns of plant diversity and their environmental drivers, dynamics of plant distribution under global change and future scenario projections, phylogeographic evolution and paleogeographic reconstruction, impacts of human activities (e.g., urbanization) on plant geographic patterns, and the coupling between plant functional traits and geographic distributions with their ecological implications. Based on these themes, the paper further synthesizes trends in theoretical framework development and innovations in key technical approaches, with particular emphasis on the integration of multi-source heterogeneous data, cross-scale correlation analysis, and functional trait-based mechanistic interpretation as core drivers of disciplinary advancement. This paper aims to provide a theoretical foundation and methodological reference for future in-depth research and interdisciplinary integration in plant geography.