scholarly journals Counting counts: revised estimates of numbers of accepted species of flowering plants, seed plants, vascular plants and land plants with a review of other recent estimates

Phytotaxa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 272 (1) ◽  
pp. 82 ◽  
Author(s):  
EIMEAR NIC LUGHADHA ◽  
RAFAËL GOVAERTS ◽  
IRINA BELYAEVA ◽  
NICHOLAS BLACK ◽  
HEATHER LINDON ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
Land Plants ◽  
Seed Plants ◽  
Seed Plant ◽  
Plant Names ◽  
The World ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
Plant Families ◽  
International Plant

We present revised estimates of the numbers of accepted species of flowering plants (369,434), seed plants (370,492), vascular plants (383,671) and land plants (403,911) based on a recently de-duplicated version of the International Plant Names Index and rates of synonymy calculated from the seed plant families published in the World checklist of selected plant families. Alternative approaches to estimating or calculating the number of accepted plant species are discussed and differences between results are highlighted and interpreted.

scholarly journals Challenges of Integrating and Curating Nomenclatural and Taxonomic Data in the World Checklist of Vascular Plants 

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Turner ◽  
Rafaël Govaerts
Keyword(s):  
Data Integration ◽  
Real World ◽  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Scientific Data ◽  
Editorial Team ◽  
Integration Process ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Plant Names ◽  
The World ◽  
Plant Families

The World Checklist of Vascular Plants (WCVP) is the Royal Botanic Gardens (RBG) Kew’s global names and taxonomy output. The underlying data sources, the International Plant Names Index (IPNI), the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (WCSP), and the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families – in Review (WCSP – In Review) are actively curated by a dedicated editorial team, who manage contributions from a wide range of international partners. WCVP is the intersection between IPNI and WCSP/WCSP-In Review and provides the names and taxonomy backbone for Plants of the World Online (POWO) – the web portal bringing Kew scientific data online. WCSP contains the peer reviewed taxonomic data covering about half of all vascular plant families. The taxonomy presented in WCSP is currently widely used, with most authoritative web resources on plants using the WCSP data either directly or indirectly. WCVP will bring this together with the remaining families currently in the ‘In-Review’ database. IPNI is a nomenclatural listing of all effectively published taxonomic acts for Plant Names (new species, new combinations, new names at rank of Family down to infraspecific). It is a project that has been continually compiling lists of new plant names since 1895. It provides the basis of many external plant names databases including Tropicos and GBIF and a point of contact for users to ask questions on plant nomenclature, with a public facing access to the nomenclatural expertise at Kew. The database is actively maintained, edited and added to daily. This presentation will cover: The integration of the resources and how the integrated product will be presented online How the integrated product supports outputs like POWO Experiences from the data integration process (the matching tools iteratively developed and tested in real world circumstances by dedicated staff) The development of programmatic API access and names matching tools The drafting of a data paper describing the WCVP (with access to a full download) The integration of the resources and how the integrated product will be presented online How the integrated product supports outputs like POWO Experiences from the data integration process (the matching tools iteratively developed and tested in real world circumstances by dedicated staff) The development of programmatic API access and names matching tools The drafting of a data paper describing the WCVP (with access to a full download)

scholarly journals The World Flora Online 2020 project: will Cameroon come up to the expectation?

Rodriguésia ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 66 (4) ◽  
pp. 961-972 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jean Michel Onana
Keyword(s):  
Plant Species ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
West African ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Red Data Book ◽  
The World ◽  
Data Book ◽  
Plant Families ◽  
High Level

Abstract Biodiverse Cameroon has been highlighted as the top country in tropical Africa for plant species diversity per degree square, with a higher diversity than all other West African countries added together, and including two of the top documented centres of plant diversity in Tropical Africa. Despite its reduced taxonomic capacity, with only six active taxonomists a high level of botanical activity in the country has resulted in accomplishments such as the databasing of the YA Herbarium (over 60,000 records), which has an in-country collection coverage of almost 95% of the known plant species that are recorded for Cameroon. Other accomplishments are the Red Data Book of the Flowering Plants of Cameroon, several local checklists and published volumes of the Flore du Cameroun which covers 37% of the country's species. Currently the checklist of Cameroon records 7,850 taxa at species and infraspecific level. Resources are needed to support and heighten the profile of this small botanical community. Already thanks to strong collaboration between Cameroon and renowned botanical institutes of others countries, in particular France and United Kingdom, one hundred and thirteen plant families have been published and would help this country to complete the recording of its biodiversity towards contributing to the World Flora Online 2020 project.

scholarly journals Simultaneous parsimony jackknife analysis of 2538rbcL DNA sequences reveals support for major clades of green plants, land plants, seed plants and flowering plants

1998 ◽  
Vol 213 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 259-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mari K�llersj� ◽  
James S. Farris ◽  
Mark W. Chase ◽  
Birgitta Bremer ◽  
Michael F. Fay ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Dna Sequences ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
Land Plants ◽  
Seed Plants ◽  
Green Plants ◽  
Jackknife Analysis

scholarly journals The Heavy Links between Geological Events and Vascular Plants Evolution: A Brief Outline

2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aldo Piombino
Keyword(s):  
Fossil Record ◽  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Vascular Plant ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
Plant Evolution ◽  
Seed Plants ◽  
Fast Diffusion ◽  
Extinction Rate ◽  
Environmental Condition ◽  
Plant Origin

Since the rise of photosynthesis, life has influenced terrestrial atmosphere, particularly the O2 and the CO2 content (the latter being originally more than 95%), changing the chemistry of waters, atmosphere, and soils. Billions of years after, a far offspring of these first unicellular forms conquered emerging lands, not only completely changing landscape, but also modifying geological cycles of deposition and erosion, many chemical and physical characteristics of soils and fresh waters, and, more, the cycle of various elements. So, there are no doubts that vascular plants modified geology; but it is true that also geology has affected (and, more, has driven) plant evolution. New software, PyRate, has determined vascular plant origin and diversification through a Bayesian analysis of fossil record from Silurian to today, particularly observing their origination and extinction rate. A comparison between PyRate data and geological history suggests that geological events massively influenced plant evolution and that also the rise of nonflowering seed plants and the fast diffusion of flowering plants can be explained, almost partly, with the environmental condition changes induced by geological phenomena.

scholarly journals WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online Taxonomic Backbone data

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roeland Kindt
Keyword(s):  
Success Rate ◽  
Tree Species ◽  
Vascular Plants ◽  
R Package ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Data Set ◽  
Plant Names ◽  
The World ◽  
Fuzzy Matching ◽  
Timber Tree

ABSTRACTPremise of the studyStandardization of plant names is a critical step in various fields of biology including biodiversity, biogeography and vegetation research. WorldFlora matches lists of plant names with a static copy from World Flora Online (WFO), an ongoing global effort of completing an online flora of all known vascular plants and bryophytes by 2020.Methods and resultsBased on direct and fuzzy matching, WorldFlora inserts matching cases from the WFO to a submitted data set of with taxa. Results of selecting the expected best single matches are presented for four data sets, including a working list of commercial timber tree species, a subset from GlobalTreeSearch and 2 data sets used in previous comparisons of software tools for correcting taxon names. The success rate of credible matches varied from 94.7 (568 taxa) to 99.9 (1740 taxa) percent.ConclusionsWorldFlora offers a straightforward pipeline for semi-automatic plant name checking.

scholarly journals The number of known plants species in the world and its annual increase

Phytotaxa ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 261 (3) ◽  
pp. 201 ◽  
Author(s):  
MAARTEN J.M. CHRISTENHUSZ ◽  
JAMES W. BYNG
Keyword(s):  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Flowering Plants ◽  
Major Contributor ◽  
Species Discovery ◽  
Slowing Down ◽  
Scientific Support ◽  
Plant Groups ◽  
Natural History Studies ◽  
The World ◽  
Number Of Plant Species

We have counted the currently known, described and accepted number of plant species as ca 374,000, of which approximately 308,312 are vascular plants, with 295,383 flowering plants (angiosperms; monocots: 74,273; eudicots: 210,008). Global numbers of smaller plant groups are as follows: algae ca 44,000, liverworts ca 9,000, hornworts ca 225, mosses 12,700, lycopods 1,290, ferns 10,560 and gymnosperms 1,079. Phytotaxa is currently contributing more than a quarter of the ca 2000 species that are described every year, showing that it has become a major contributor to the dissemination of new species discovery. However, the rate of discovery is slowing down, due to reduction in financial and scientific support for fundamental natural history studies.

scholarly journals The emergence, evolution, and diversification of the miR390-TAS3-ARF pathway in land plants

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rui Xia ◽  
Jing Xu ◽  
Blake C. Meyers
Keyword(s):  
Significant Variation ◽  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Target Genes ◽  
Land Plants ◽  
Auxin Signaling ◽  
Seed Plants ◽  
Regulatory Circuit ◽  
Target Sites ◽  
Lower Stem ◽  
Processing Mechanism

AbstractIn plants, miR390 directs the production of tasiRNAs from TRANS-ACTING SIRNA 3 (TAS3) transcripts to regulate AUXIN RESPONSIVE FACTOR (ARF) genes, transcription factors critical for auxin signaling; these tasiRNAs are known as tasiARFs. This pathway is highly conserved, with the TAS3 as the only one noncoding gene present almost ubiquitously in land plants. To understand the evolution of this miR390-TAS3-ARF pathway, we characterized homologs of these three genes from thousands of plant species, from bryophytes to angiosperms. Both miR390 and TAS3 are present and functional in liverworts, confirming their ancestral role to regulate ARFs in land plants. We found the lower-stem region of MIR390 genes, critical for accurate DCL1 (DICER-LIKE 1) processing, is conserved in sequence in seed plants. We propose a model for the transition of functional tasiRNA sequences in TAS3 genes occurred at the emergence of vascular plants, in which the two miR390 target sites of TAS3 genes showed distinct pairing patterns in different plant lineages. Based on the cleavability of miR390 target sites and the distance between target site and tasiARF we inferred a potential bidirectional processing mechanism exists for some TAS3 genes. We also demonstrated a tight mutual selection between tasiARF and its target genes, and characterized unusual aspects and diversity of regulatory components of this pathway. Taken together, these data illuminate the evolutionary path of the miR390-TAS3-ARF pathway in land plants, and demonstrate the significant variation that occurs in the production of phasiRNAs in plants, even in the functionally important and archetypal miR390-TAS3-ARF regulatory circuit.

scholarly journals Analyses towards determining Madagascar’s place in global biogeography

2012 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 363-374 ◽  
Author(s):  
Şerban Procheş ◽  
Syd Ramdhani
Keyword(s):  
Vascular Plants ◽  
Pacific Islands ◽  
Tropical Africa ◽  
Tropical Asia ◽  
Taxonomic Level ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Plant Families ◽  
Different Levels

Abstract The relationships of Madagascan plant and animal taxa have been the object of much fascination, Madagascar sharing numerous lineages with Africa, others with Asia, Australia, or the Americas, and many others being of uncertain relationships. In commonly accepted global regionalization schemata, Madagascar is treated together with Africa for animals, and with Africa, tropical Asia and the Pacific islands in the case of plants. Here we examine the similarities between the biotic assemblages of (i) tropical Africa, (ii) Madagascar, and (iii) the rest of the world, on a basic taxonomic level, considering the families of vascular plants and vertebrates as analysis units. The percentages of endemic families, families shared pair-wise between regions, or present in all three, are roughly similar between the two broad groups, though plant families with ranges limited to one region are proportionally fewer. In dendrograms and multidimensional scaling plots for different groups, Madagascar clusters together with Africa, Asia or both, and sometimes with smaller Indian Ocean Islands, but quite often (though not in plants) as a convincingly separate cluster. Our results for vertebrates justify the status of full zoogeographic region for Madagascar, though an equally high rank in geobotanical regionalization would mean also treating Africa and Tropical Asia as separate units, which would be debatable given the overall greater uniformity of plant assemblages. Beyond the Madagascan focus of this paper, the differences between plant and vertebrate clusters shown here suggest different levels of ecological plasticity at the same taxonomic level, with plant families being much more environmentally-bound, and thus clustering along biome lines rather than regional lines.

scholarly journals Integrating Taxonomic Names and Concepts from Paper and Digital Sources for a New Flora of Alaska

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Campbell Webb ◽  
Stefanie Ickert-Bond ◽  
Kimberly Cook
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Collection Management ◽  
Region Connection Calculus ◽  
Plant Names ◽  
Taxonomic Concept ◽  
Alignment Process ◽  
Data Tables ◽  
Plant Families ◽  
Different Sources ◽  
International Plant

The taxonomic foundation of a new regional flora or monograph is the reconciliation of pre-existing names and taxonomic concepts (i.e., variation in usage of those names). This reconciliation is traditionally done manually, but the availability of taxonomic resources online and of text manipulation software means that some of the work can now be automated, speeding up the development of new taxonomic products. As a contribution to developing a new Flora of Alaska (floraofalaska.org), we have digitized the main pre-existing flora (Hultén 1968) and combined it with key online taxonomic name sources (Panarctic Flora, Flora of North America, International Plant Names Index - IPNI, Tropicos, Kew’s World Checklist of Selected Plant Families), to build a canonical list of names anchored to external Globally Unique Identifiers (GUIDs) (e.g., IPNI URLs). We developed taxonomically-aware fuzzy-matching software (matchnames, Webb 2020) to identify cognates in different lists. The taxa for which there are variations between different sources in accepted names and synonyms are then flagged for review by taxonomic experts. However, even though names may be consistent across previous monographs and floras, the taxonomic concept (or circumscription) of a name may differ among authors, meaning that the way an accepted name in the flora is applied may be unfamiliar to the users of previous floras. We therefore have begun to manually align taxonomic concepts across five existing floras: Panarctic Flora, Flora of North America, Cody’s Flora of the Yukon (Cody 2000), Welsh’s Flora (Welsh 1974) and Hultén’s Flora (Hultén 1968), analysing usage and recording the Region Connection Calculus (RCC-5) relationships between taxonomic concepts common to each source. So far, we have mapped taxa in 13 genera, containing 557 taxonomic concepts and 482 taxonomic concept relationships. To facilitate this alignment process we developed software (tcm, Webb 2021) to record publications, names, taxonomic concepts and relationships, and to visualize the taxonomic concept relationships as graphs. These relationship graphs have proved to be accessible and valuable in discussing the frequently complex shifts in circumscription with the taxonomic experts who have reviewed the work. The taxonomic concept data are being integrated into the larger dataset to permit users of the new flora to instantly see both the chain of synonymy and concept map for any name. We have also worked with the developer of the Arctos Collection Management Solution (a database used for the majority of Alaskan collections) on new data tables for storage and display of taxonomic concept data. In this presentation, we will describe some of the ideas and workflows that may be of value to others working to connect across taxonomic resources.

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