%0 Journal Article
%T Medicinal-Plant Chemistry Under Climate Instability Requires Dynamic Provenance: A Risk Model Linking Environment, Developmental Stage, Harvest Timing, and Therapeutic-Quality Specifications
%A Mateo Alvarez
%A Sofia Herrera
%A Diego Cruz
%A Andres Castro
%J Specialty Journal of Pharmacognosy, Phytochemistry, and Biotechnology
%@ 3062-441X
%D 2026
%V 6
%N 1
%R 10.51847/xWI6dwzZZC
%P 71-79
%X Medicinal-plant provenance is commonly recorded as a geographic property, yet climate instability increasingly challenges the assumption that material collected from the same named region will retain a chemically comparable state across years, seasons, developmental stages, and harvest conditions. This article develops an original provenance-risk model for medicinal plants that treats provenance as a dynamic combination of botanical identity, environmental exposure, developmental state, harvest timing, early post-harvest history, and analytical confidence. The supporting literature shows that climatic and edaphic variables can influence specialized-metabolite profiles, that different metabolite classes may respond differently to the same environmental stress, and that developmental and harvest transitions can substantially alter medicinal-material chemistry. These observations do not establish a universal direction of chemical change or demonstrate that chemical drift necessarily changes therapeutic efficacy. The proposed model therefore separates observed chemical variation from specification-relevant drift and, further, from any inference concerning therapeutic-quality consequences. It also preserves geographic origin as an essential baseline while rejecting its use as a sufficient proxy for the environmental and temporal conditions that generate the measured chemical state. The resulting framework is intended to support risk-informed sourcing, longitudinal chemical surveillance, and evidence-linked quality specifications rather than provide a validated predictive score. Prospective multi-year, multi-site, genotype-aware, analytically harmonized, and functionally qualified studies will be required before dynamic provenance can be translated into generalizable decision thresholds or regulatory practice.
%U https://galaxypub.co/article/medicinal-plant-chemistry-under-climate-instability-requires-dynamic-provenance-a-risk-model-linkin-cngsaqglxdunq30