Medicinal plants in a changing climate: evolutionary genomics for resilience and conservation

Medicinal plants face growing threats from climate change, habitat fragmentation, selective harvesting, and other human-induced pressures that may diminish genetic diversity and weaken evolutionary resilience. Recent studies in population genomics and landscape genomics indicate that resilience is influenced not just by diversity across a species, but also by how adaptive variation is distributed among populations and its connection to environmental gradients. In medicinal plants, factors such as geographic isolation, precipitation, temperature, salinity, and demographic history have been linked to population differentiation and potential adaptive loci. Genomic methods can thus shift conservation from outlining neutral diversity to pinpointing populations and alleles that may be significant for upcoming climates. Simultaneously, transcriptomic, metabolomic, and epigenetic research shows that genetic adaptation is enhanced by phenotypic plasticity and environmental modulation of stress and specialized metabolism pathways. Nevertheless, direct evidence linking adaptive genomic variation to fitness in wild medicinal plant populations is still scarce, and numerous at-risk taxa are deficient in genomic resources. In this study, we integrate recent findings that connect genetic variability, regional adaptation, molecular stress responses, and conservation strategies for medicinal plants. We emphasize landscape genomics and genomic vulnerability as tangible connections between evolutionary ecology and conservation, stressing the importance of incorporating adaptive variation, epigenetic plasticity, demographic history, ecological interactions, and habitat preservation. Future research should emphasize non-model medicinal species, wider geographic sampling, temporal genomic tracking, and field validation of potential adaptive loci.