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New Guinea has the most plant species of any island

New Guinea is the planet’s most floristically diverse island, reports a comprehensive assessment of vascular plant species published in the journal Nature.

The species list, which was compiled by 99 botanists from 56 institutions across 19 countries, verified the identity of over 23,000 plant names from over 704,000 specimens collected from New Guinea since the 1750s.

This joint expedition of the Papua New Guinea Forest Research Institute & Kew was supported by the residents of Indagen Village, according to Kew. Credit RBG Kew.
This joint expedition of the Papua New Guinea Forest Research Institute & Kew was supported by the residents of Indagen Village, according to Kew. Credit Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.

The research concludes New Guinea has 13,634 species of plants from 1742 genera and 264 families. That gives New Guinea, the world’s second largest island, the highest plant diversity of any island on Earth, surpassing Madagascar (11,832 species), Borneo (11,165 species), and Sumatra (8,391 species). New Guinea’s diversity of plants is greater than that of the entire archipelago of the Philippines (9,432 species).

Just five families account for more than a third of plant species on the island. Orchids, with 2,856 species or 21% of the island’s species, are the most diverse.

There are 3,962 species of trees in New Guinea or about four times the number found across all of North America.

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By Rhett Ayers Butler

Rhett Ayers Butler is the Founder and CEO of Mongabay, a non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform. He started Mongabay in 1999 with the mission of raising interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife.