idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft

Nachrichten, Termine, Experten

Grafik: idw-Logo
Science Video Project
idw-Abo

idw-News App:

AppStore

Google Play Store



Instanz:
Teilen: 
05.08.2020 17:00

New Guinea Has the World’s Richest Island Flora

Melanie Nyfeler Kommunikation
Universität Zürich

    New Guinea is the most floristically diverse island in the world, an international collaboration led by the University of Zurich 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.

    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 Cámara-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 Cámara-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 Cámara-Leret. “Such initiatives pave the way for the grand challenge of conserving the richest island flora of the world.”


    Wissenschaftliche Ansprechpartner:

    Rodrigo Cámara-Leret
    Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies
    University of Zurich
    Tel. +41 635 61 65
    E-mail: rodrigo.camaraleret@ieu.uzh.ch


    Originalpublikation:

    Rodrigo Cámara-Leret et all. New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora. Nature, 5. August 2020. DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2549-5.


    Bilder

    View of mature forest and mountains taken from the Lae-Madang Highway at Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.
    View of mature forest and mountains taken from the Lae-Madang Highway at Morobe Province, Papua New ...
    (Image: Zacky Ezedin)

    The pitcher plant Nepenthes biak, a terrestrial climber that is endemic to limestone coastal cliffs in the lowland evergreen forest zone of Biak island in Indonesian New Guinea.
    The pitcher plant Nepenthes biak, a terrestrial climber that is endemic to limestone coastal cliffs ...
    (Image: Matin Cheek)


    Anhang
    attachment icon Musa ingens is a species of banana endemic to New Guinea with stems that can exceed 15 meters in height and 2 m in circumference, and fruits of more than 1.5 kg.

    Merkmale dieser Pressemitteilung:
    Journalisten
    Biologie, Tier / Land / Forst, Umwelt / Ökologie
    überregional
    Forschungsergebnisse, Forschungsprojekte
    Englisch


     

    View of mature forest and mountains taken from the Lae-Madang Highway at Morobe Province, Papua New Guinea.


    Zum Download

    x

    The pitcher plant Nepenthes biak, a terrestrial climber that is endemic to limestone coastal cliffs in the lowland evergreen forest zone of Biak island in Indonesian New Guinea.


    Zum Download

    x

    Hilfe

    Die Suche / Erweiterte Suche im idw-Archiv
    Verknüpfungen

    Sie können Suchbegriffe mit und, oder und / oder nicht verknüpfen, z. B. Philo nicht logie.

    Klammern

    Verknüpfungen können Sie mit Klammern voneinander trennen, z. B. (Philo nicht logie) oder (Psycho und logie).

    Wortgruppen

    Zusammenhängende Worte werden als Wortgruppe gesucht, wenn Sie sie in Anführungsstriche setzen, z. B. „Bundesrepublik Deutschland“.

    Auswahlkriterien

    Die Erweiterte Suche können Sie auch nutzen, ohne Suchbegriffe einzugeben. Sie orientiert sich dann an den Kriterien, die Sie ausgewählt haben (z. B. nach dem Land oder dem Sachgebiet).

    Haben Sie in einer Kategorie kein Kriterium ausgewählt, wird die gesamte Kategorie durchsucht (z.B. alle Sachgebiete oder alle Länder).