Why Is the Plant Species Threatened ?

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Why is the plant species threatened? When you first here the phrase ‘endangered species’ you normally think of animals but according to the global analysis about 76,000 of the world's estimated 380,000 species of plants are heading to extinction. Of course, humans are the main culprits. In Lagos, Nigeria we cut down a lot of our agriculture to make furniture, paper and to prepare space for infrastructures. That is quite harmful to our biodiversity and causes many animals to move away. According to the World Bank report, the plant species threatened in Nigeria was 171 last year! So why are plants threatened? Plants get extinct by either man-made or natural causes. For example, a volcano erupting can kill an entire species. Also, after the ice age when the world began to warm up and the glaciers melted, many plant species died because it could not cope with the drastic change in their environment. But the main causes are us humans. We destroy their habitats which they depend on to survive for more buildings (e.g. Factories), resources like wood, creating medicines etc. Also our pollution affects plants. Industrial processes give out gases like sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxides into the air which cause acid rain. That destroys plants. Also our vehicles emit harmful gases. In addition, people and factories dump waste chemicals into the sea and that can disturb plants underwater. The pesticides used by farmers to improve the growth of their crops if used wrongly can get washed into the water and damage plants. People (like me) tend to pluck flowers from plants just because they may look pretty. That also harms plants. Bringing other plant species to their unnatural habitat is bad too because some of them do well in their new environments and endanger the plants that were there before (the native species). Plants are a necessity for us to survive therefore we

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