Thousands of undiscovered plant species face extinction

LONDON - Faced with threats like habitat loss and climate change, many thousands of rare flowering plant species worldwide may become extinct even before discovery.

“Scientists have estimated that there could be five million to 50 million of such species, but less than two million of these have been discovered till date,” says Lucas Joppa from Microsoft Research in Cambridge, Britain, who authored the study.

Joppa, who received his doctorate from Duke University this year, said: “Using novel methods, we were able to refine the estimate of total species for flowering plants and calculate how many of those remain undiscovered.”

These findings are based on data from the online World Checklist of Selected Plant Families at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

“This finding has enormous conservation implications, as unknown species are likely to be overwhelmingly rare and threatened,” says Joppa, according to a Microsoft Research release.

Study co-author David Roberts of the Durrell Institute of Conservation and Ecology, University of Kent says: “The new, more accurate estimate can be used to infer the proportion of all threatened species.”

“If we take the number of species that are currently known to be threatened and add to that those that are yet to be discovered, we can estimate that between 27 percent and 33 percent of all flowering plants will be threatened with extinction,” he adds

They were published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.