Global reliance of medicinal plants on animal pollination

Across continents and cultures, people have long turned to medicinal plants for health and nourishment. This connection to natural remedies is deeply rooted in cultural and historical traditions, yet little attention is given to the animals that pollinate these plants and secure their continued survival.

Animal pollination is a vital ecological process for the sexual reproduction of flowering plants and provides numerous benefits to humanity. While most research has centered on food crops—examining how pollinators influence their productivity, quality, and diversity— pollinators also sustain wild plant species and thus help maintain biodiversity. Among these wild species, medicinal plants are crucial for most of the world’s human population, who rely on them for primary health care.
Despite their significant benefits, most medicinal plants are in danger of extinction as they are harvested from the wild rather than cultivated, and for many of them, we know little about which pollinators they depend on—or how reliant they are on animal pollination at all. This gap in knowledge is concerning, especially as the global use of medicinal plants continues to rise across both low- and high-income countries. Compounding the issue, pollinators are in decline worldwide, posing a potential threat to the long-term availability of these essential natural resources.
Here, we will address this knowledge gap by conducting a comprehensive systematic review of the existing literature to collate information on the pollinator groups involved in the pollination of medicinal plants worldwide. Our synthesis group includes researchers and practitioners from Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, combining a broad range of skills and expertise in plant-pollinator interaction, medicinal plants, ethnobotany, evidence synthesis, conservation practice and policy making.
By extracting and analysing data from existing studies, we will quantify the contribution of pollinators to the reproductive success of medicinal plants and explore whether this contribution varies across geographic regions, climatic zones, and plant compatibility systems. In addition to this, we will classify the 10 most used medicinal plants in each continent through an ethnobotanical literature review. With this information we will seek their current conservation status, their pollinator functional groups and contribution to reproduction. This will help to assess the extent to which both most used medicinal plants and their pollinators are threatened, and whether there is a correlation between pollinator decline and the vulnerability of medicinal plant species.
Understanding these dynamics is not only essential from an ecological and scientific perspective but also holds profound implications for communities around the world that rely on medicinal plants for traditional healing, healthcare, and livelihoods. By highlighting the critical role of pollinators in ensuring the long-term survival of medicinal plants, the results of this study will underscore the potential threat that pollinator decline poses to the continued availability and sustainable use of medicinal resources for future generations, particularly for communities whose cultural practices, wellbeing, and economies are closely tied to these natural resources.