New Guinea has the world's richest island flora
Date:
August 5, 2020
Source:
University of Zurich
Summary:
New Guinea is the most floristically diverse island in the world,
an international collaboration has shown. The study presents a list
of almost 14,000 plant species, compiled from online catalogues
and verified by plant experts. The results are invaluable for
research and conservation, and also underline the importance of
expert knowledge in the digital era.
FULL STORY ========================================================================== Almost 20 times the size of Switzerland, New Guinea is the world's largest tropical island. It features a complex mosaic of ecosystems ? from lowland jungles to high-elevation grasslands with peaks higher than Mont Blanc.
Botanists have long known that this mega-diverse wilderness area is
home to a large number of plant species. Efforts to identify and name
thousands of plants collected in New Guinea and archived in herbaria
all over the world have been ongoing since the 17th century.
========================================================================== However, since researchers have worked mostly independently from
each other, a great uncertainty remains as to the exact number
of plant species, with conflicting estimates ranging from 9,000 to
25,000. "Compared to other areas like Amazonia, for which plant checklists
were recently published, New Guinea remained the 'Last Unknown'," says
Rodrigo Ca'mara-Leret, a postdoctoral researcher in the lab of Prof. Jordi Bascompte in the UZH Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies. Under his lead, 99 scientists from 56 institutions and 19
countries have now built the first expert-verified checklist for the
13,634 vascular plant species of New Guinea and its surrounding islands.
Merging databases and human knowledge The researchers began their
large-scale collaborative effort by compiling a list of plant names
from online catalogues, institutional repositories and datasets curated
by taxonomists. After standardizing the scientific names, 99 experts
on New Guinea flora checked almost 25,000 species names derived from
over 700,000 individual specimens. For this, they reviewed the list of
original names in their plant family of expertise and assessed whether
these names were correctly assigned in the online platforms. Finally,
an independent comparison was performed between the list accepted by
experts and a list contained in Plants of the World Online for New Guinea.
Tremendous, mostly endemic plant diversity The resulting checklist
contains 13,634 plants, demonstrating that New Guinea has the world's
richest island flora ? with about 20% more species than Madagascar or
Borneo. By far the most species-rich family are the orchids and almost
a third of the species are trees. One particularly remarkable finding
is that 68% of the plants are endemic ? they are only found in the
region. "Such high endemic species richness is unmatched in tropical
Asia," says Ca'mara- Leret, "It means that Indonesia and Papua New
Guinea, the two states into which the island is divided, have a unique responsibility for the survival of this irreplaceable biodiversity."
Foundation for research and protection The new authoritative checklist
will improve the accuracy of biogeographic and ecological studies,
help focus DNA sequencing on species-rich groups with high endemism,
and facilitate the discovery of more species by taxonomists.
Thousands of specimens remain unidentified in the collections and many
unknown species have yet to be discovered in the wild. "We estimate that
in the next 50 years, 3,000 to 4,000 species will be added," says Michael Kessler, co-author of the study and scientific curator of the Botanical
Garden of the University of Zurich. These efforts will be important for conservation planning and modelling the impact of changes in climate
and land use.
The collaboration also underscores that expert knowledge is still
essential in the digital era ? reliance on online platforms alone would
have erroneously inflated species counts by one fifth. However, many
of the New Guinea plants experts are already or soon to be retired,
and almost half of them are non- residents. The researchers therefore
advocate building a critical mass of resident plant taxonomists.
Policy-wise, the study shows that long-term institutional and financial
support is critical if significant advances are to be made over the
next decades. "Our work demonstrates that international collaborative
efforts using verified digital data can rapidly synthesize biodiversity information. This can serve as a model for accelerating research in
other hyper-diverse areas such as Borneo," says Ca'mara-Leret. "Such initiatives pave the way for the grand challenge of conserving the
richest island flora of the world."
========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by University_of_Zurich. Note: Content
may be edited for style and length.
========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Rodrigo Ca'mara-Leret, David G. Frodin, Frits Adema, Christiane
Anderson,
Marc S. Appelhans, George Argent, Susana Arias Guerrero, Peter
Ashton, William J. Baker, Anders S. Barfod, David Barrington,
Renata Borosova, Gemma L. C. Bramley, Marie Briggs, Sven Buerki,
Daniel Cahen, Martin W.
Callmander, Martin Cheek, Cheng-Wei Chen, Barry J. Conn, Mark J. E.
Coode, Iain Darbyshire, Sally Dawson, John Dransfield, Clare
Drinkell, Brigitta Duyfjes, Atsushi Ebihara, Zacky Ezedin,
Long-Fei Fu, Osia Gideon, Deden Girmansyah, Rafae"l Govaerts,
Helen Fortune-Hopkins, Gustavo Hassemer, Alistair Hay, Charlie
D. Heatubun, D. J. Nicholas Hind, Peter Hoch, Peter Homot, Peter
Hovenkamp, Mark Hughes, Matthew Jebb, Laura Jennings, Tiberius
Jimbo, Michael Kessler, Ruth Kiew, Sandra Knapp, Penniel Lamei,
Marcus Lehnert, Gwilym P. Lewis, Hans Peter Linder, Stuart
Lindsay, Yee Wen Low, Eve Lucas, Jeffrey P. Mancera, Alexandre
K. Monro, Alison Moore, David J. Middleton, Hidetoshi Nagamasu,
Mark F. Newman, Eimear Nic Lughadha, Pablo H. A. Melo, Daniel
J. Ohlsen, Caroline M.
Pannell, Barbara Parris, Laura Pearce, Darin S. Penneys, Leon
R. Perrie, Peter Petoe, Axel Dalberg Poulsen, Ghillean T. Prance,
J. Peter Quakenbush, Niels Raes, Michele Rodda, Zachary S. Rogers,
Andre' Schuiteman, Pedro Schwartsburd, Robert W. Scotland, Mark
P. Simmons, David A. Simpson, Peter Stevens, Michael Sundue,
Weston Testo, Anna Trias-Blasi, Ian Turner, Timothy Utteridge,
Lesley Walsingham, Bruce L.
Webber, Ran Wei, George D. Weiblen, Maximilian Weigend, Peter
Weston, Willem de Wilde, Peter Wilkie, Christine M. Wilmot-Dear,
Hannah P.
Wilson, John R. I. Wood, Li-Bing Zhang, Peter C. van Welzen. New
Guinea has the world's richest island flora. Nature, 2020; DOI:
10.1038/s41586- 020-2549-5 ==========================================================================
Link to news story:
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200805124056.htm
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