Tapping the biological and chemical diversity of Canada's plants: An interdisciplinary approach

植物代谢物对全球生态系统和经济至关重要。在生物学上，它们维持食物链，介导种间的相互作用，并塑造共同进化的关系。从经济上讲，人类已经利用植物化学用于食品、医药、杀虫剂、生物燃料和其他工业或文化目的。在加拿大，尽管有着无与伦比的北方和北极生物多样性，独特的南方生态系统和丰富的土著传统知识，但我们的植物仍然令人惊讶地未被科学探索和开发。此外，虽然植物的生态学和人类利用从根本上通过植物化学产生的生物化学效应联系在一起，但这两种观点很少被整合和探索，以提供对彼此的洞察力。

Plant metabolites are vital to global ecosystems and economies. Ecologically, they sustain food chains, mediate interspecific interactions, and shape co-evolutionary relationships. Economically, humans have harnessed plant chemistry for food, medicine, pesticides, biofuels and other industrial or cultural purposes. In Canada, despite unsurpassed boreal and arctic biodiversity, distinct southern ecosystems and rich indigenous traditional knowledge, our plants remain surprisingly unexplored and underdeveloped by science. Moreover, while the ecology and human uses of plants are fundamentally linked through the biochemical effects generated by plant chemistry, the two perspectives are seldom integrated and explored to provide insight on one another.