Plants are what bridge soil to water, water to Oxygen, Oxygen to life. Plants are the vascular system of the Earth; Most living things that are not plants can't go very long with out Oxygen.
Like everything else ecologists and environmental scientists have been saying for ~5 decades, this is an indicator that the destructive nature of modern humans cannot and probably will not be sustained.
"Since 1900, nearly 3 species of seed-bearing plants have disappeared per year ― 500 times faster than they would naturally."
The project looked at more than 330,000 species and found that plants on islands and in the tropics were the most likely to be declared extinct. Trees, shrubs and other woody perennials had the highest probability of disappearing regardless of where they were located. The results were published on 10 June in Nature Ecology & Evolution.
Even though the researchers carefully curated the plant extinction database, the study’s numbers are almost certainly an underestimate of the problem, says Jurriaan de Vos, a phylogeneticist at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Some plant species are “functionally extinct”, he notes, and are present only in botanical gardens or in such small numbers in the wild that researchers don’t expect the population to survive."
Source:
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01810-6