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March
20, 2007 BIOLOGISTS
PRODUCE GLOBAL MAP OF PLANT
BIODIVERSITY Biologists at the The map, which
accompanies a study published in
this week's early online issue of the journal Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences, highlights areas of
particular
concern for conservation. It also, the scientists say, provides much
needed
assistance in gauging the likely impact of climate change on the
services
plants provide to humans. Walter Jetz of UCSD
and Holger Kreft of the “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,” says Jetz, an assistant professor of biology at
UCSD and the senior
author of the paper. “Tropical countries such as While explorers to
these tropical regions long ago
recognized this increased diversity over more temperate regions, the
general
understanding among ecologists about this striking difference continues
to be
very limited. “Given
that we are far off from knowing the
individual distributions of the world's 300,000 odd plant
species,” says Jetz.
“Holger Kreft and I investigated how well the richness of
plants can be
predicted from environmental conditions alone.” Combining
field-survey based species counts from
over a thousand regions worldwide with high-resolution environmental
data, the
scientists were able to accurately capture the factors that promote
high
species richness of plants. “Climate
change may drive to extinction plants that
hold important cures before we find them,” says Kreft, a
biologist at the Nees
Institute for Biodiversity of Plants at the
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