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Amazon, Madagascar, Borneo are top plant biodiversity hotspots mongabay.com March 20, 2007 The map, published in this week's early online issue of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), was produced by Walter Jetz of UCSD and Holger Kreft of the University of Bonn. Jetz and Kreft sought "to determine how well the diversity, or the 'richness,' of plant species could be predicted from environmental conditions alone," according to a release from UCSD.
Seeking to developing a map that "accurately capture[d] the factors that promote high species richness of plants", Jetz and Kreft combined high-resolution environmental data with field-surveys from more than one thousand sites worldwide. "This allowed us to estimate the richness of yet unsurveyed parts of the world," explained Jetz. "The global map of estimated plant species richness highlights areas of particular concern for conservation and provides much needed assistance in gauging the likely impact of climate change on the services plants provide to humans. It may also help to pinpoint areas that deserve further attention for the discovery of plants or drugs yet unknown to humanity." "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 University of Bonn. "Ecological research like ours that captures complex diversity - environment relationships on a global scale may assist in a small, but important way so that such a fatal potential failure can be averted." This article quotes extensively from a UCSD news release Comments? News options
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