Journal
PLANTS PEOPLE PLANET
Volume 3, Issue 1, Pages 33-44Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/ppp3.10110
Keywords
areas of plant diversity; global biodiversity patterns; global plant diversity; plant diversity analysis; plant species richness
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Funding
- Prince Albert II of Monaco Foundation for the Plants Under Pressure programme at the Natural History Museum
- NERC London Doctoral Training Programme [NE/R012148/1]
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Identifying regions rich in plant species is crucial for effective conservation efforts, especially for professionals and conservationists. This review summarizes global studies of plant diversity, highlighting areas consistently identified as rich in plant species, which is important for achieving international conservation targets and understanding global biodiversity distribution.
Societal Impact Statement Identifying regions of the world that are rich in plant species will enable conservation efforts to be more effectively targeted. We present a review of global studies of plant diversity, including novel analyses from our own work, and highlight areas of the world that are consistently identified by multiple studies utilizing varied data sets as being particularly rich in plant species. This will be of interest to botanical professionals and conservationists seeking to identify and conserve priority species-rich environments, including those working to progress international conservation targets, and to all those interested in the global distribution of biodiversity and its conservation. SummaryAreas of high diversity for vascular plants, both for numbers of species and of endemic species, are by now well established and in agreement across a variety of studies using a wide range of data from different sources. Here we review the current state of knowledge of geographical patterns of plant diversity around the world, compare this with our knowledge of vertebrate taxonomic groups, and reflect on next steps for better characterizing patterns of diversity in order to achieve effective conservation prioritization. We illustrate this with analyses of geographical patterns of plant diversity from three different data types with differing degrees of geographical and ecological resolution. At broad spatial scales these analyses are largely congruent with each other and with areas of high diversity and endemism for species of terrestrial vertebrates.
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