Global map of plant biodiversity created

SAN DIEGO, March 20 (UPI) -- A German-U.S. team of biologists has produced what is called the most extensive global map of plant biodiversity ever issued.

Walter Jetz of the University of California-San Diego and Holger Kreft of the University of Bonn in Germany said their map also helps gage the likely impact of climate change on the services plants provide to humans.

"Plants provide important services to humans-such as ornaments, structure, food and bio-molecules that can be used for the development of drugs or alternative fuels-that increase in value with their richness," said Jetz. "Tropical countries such as Ecuador or Colombia harbor, by a factor 10 to 100, higher plant species richness than most parts of the United States or Europe. The question is, why?

"Given that we are far off from knowing the individual distributions of the world's 300,000 odd plant species," added Jetz, "Holger Kreft and I investigated how well the richness of plants can be predicted from environmental conditions alone."

The map and an accompanying study appear in the online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.