Young adults in eastern Germany know dandelion and sparrows but few farmland species.
Tobias N, Maria K
Ethnobotany
Cornflower and Chamomile — plants your grandparents likely knew by name from roadsides and field edges — are disappearing from public awareness just as they are from the landscape itself, and that forgetting may be one reason nobody fights to bring them back.
Researchers asked hundreds of people in a farming region of Germany to name the wild plants and birds they knew from the fields around them. Most people could only name a handful — and those were mostly common city-tolerant species like dandelions and pigeons, not the wildflowers and skylarks that actually define healthy farmland. Older people knew far more characteristic species than younger ones, suggesting a quiet generational erasure of everyday plant knowledge.
Key Findings
On average, participants named only 2 plant and 3 bird species out of 62 plant and 25 bird farmland indicator species known to occur in the region — less than 5% coverage.
Farmland specialist plants (Cornflower, Chamomile, Yarrow) and birds (Starling, Skylark) were significantly more salient among adults over 45, while younger adults defaulted to generalists like Dandelion and Stinging Nettle.
Only 15 plant and 21 bird taxa formed the shared cultural knowledge ('cultural domain') of local farmland species across all 463 participants, indicating a narrow collective baseline.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A study of 463 adults in rural eastern Germany found that most people could name only 2 plant and 3 bird species typical of their local farmland, despite living surrounded by agricultural landscapes. Younger adults knew even fewer species, with farmland-specialist plants like Cornflower and Chamomile nearly invisible to those under 45.
Abstract Preview
The global biodiversity crisis comprises the ongoing loss of species simultaneous to the decrease in local knowledge of native plant and animal species. Such local knowledge is fundamental to socie...
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