How many species of plant are there?

It should be a simple question. After all, we have been describing, naming, and studying species of plants for 500 years, and the whole system of nomenclature and classification was developed in order to list plants. Estimate range widely, from 200,000 to nearly 300,000 or even 400,000 [also here] and up. There are about one million plant names, but many of these are synonyms, and many are also not species, but subspecies or varieties.

It turns out that the number harder to identify than usually thought or reported, and this has become clear because the Missouri Botanical Garden, the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, the New York Botanical Garden, the Global Compositae Checklist in New Zealand, International Legume Database & Information Service, the International Organization for Plant Information, and the International Plant Names Index have all collaborated on putting together a single comprehensive and synonymised list of all plant species.

Called The Plant List, it lists 298,900 accepted species, 477,601 synonyms, and 263,925 as-yet unresolved names. It’s a nontrivial achievement. Here, for instance, is the list of all species names in the genus Rosa (roses). There’s 885 of them, mostly subspecific varieties.

As taxonomy becomes crucial for our biodiversity conservation efforts in the face of major ecological shifts with global warming, such lists, more than a simple literature search but with added value from a critical analysis of each, will become a major tool.

Here’s the press release and here’s a Grauniad article complete with cheesy pun.

Filed under: Ecology and Biodiversity, Species and systematics, Species concept, Systematics

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