Green Plants in the Red: A Baseline Global Assessment for the IUCN Sampled Red List Index for Plants.

ABSTRACT: Plants provide fundamental support systems for life on Earth and are the basis for all terrestrial ecosystems; a decline in plant diversity will be detrimental to all other groups of organisms including humans. Decline in plant diversity has been hard to quantify, due to the huge numbers of known and yet to be discovered species and the lack of an adequate baseline assessment of extinction risk against which to track changes. The biodiversity of many remote parts of the world remains poorly known, and the rate of new assessments of extinction risk for individual plant species approximates the rate at which new plant species are described. Thus the question 'How threatened are plants?' is still very difficult to answer accurately. While completing assessments for each species of plant remai

SUBMITTER: Brummitt NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4529080 | biostudies-literature | 2015

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature