CENTERS OF SEED-PLANT DIVERSITY - THE FAMILY WAY

Map of wholesale species richness (numbers) are urgently required to guide the conservation of biodiversity. The problem is that complete counts of organisms are impractical at present. Indirect solutions are needed that will be both cheap and quick. One approach is to re-deploy sampling effort higher up the taxonomic scale, to measure richness among genera, tribes or families. Data for numbers of higher taxa have the advantage over data for species that they are usually not only more complete, but also cheaper to acquire. So for the same cost, surveys could be broadened to encompass more of wholesale biodiversity. Data for seed-plant families were used to map worldwide the regional distribution of richness and a measure of endemism. Differences among areas in plant family lists were then used to rank the top ten complementary areas for maximizing cumulative family richness at each step.