New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora

Cámara‐Leret, Rodrigo; Frodin, David G.; Adema, F.; Anderson, Christiane; Appelhans, Marc S.; Argent, G.; Guerrero, Susana Arias; Ashton, Peter S.; Baker, William J.; Barfod, Anders S.; Barrington, David S.; Borosova, Renata; Bramley, Gemma L. C.; Briggs, Marie; Buerki, Sven; Cahen, Daniel; Callmander, Martin W.; Cheek, Martin; Chen, Christopher; Conn, Barry John; Coode, M. J. E.; Darbyshire, Iain; Dawson, S. E.; Dransfield, John; Drinkell, Clare; Duyfjes, B.E.E.; Ebihara, Atsushi; Ezedin, Zacky; Fu, Long; Gideon, Osia; Girmansyah, Deden; Govaerts, Rafaël; Fortune-Hopkins, Helen; Hassemer, Gustavo; Hay, Alistair; Heatubun, Charlie D.; Hind, D. J. N.; Hoch, Peter C.; Homot, Peter; Hovenkamp, P.; Hughes, Mark; Jebb, Matthew; Jennings, Laura V. S.; Jimbo, Tiberius; Kessler, Michael; Kiew, Ruth; Knapp, Sandra; Lamei, Penniel; Lehnert, Marcus; Lewis, Gwilym P.; Linder, H. Peter; Lindsay, Stuart; Low, Yee Wen; Lucas, Eve; Mancera, Jeffrey P.; Monro, Alexandre K.; Moore, Alison; Middleton, David J.; Nagamasu, Hidetoshi; Newman, Mark F.; Lughadha, Eimear Nic; Melo, Pablo Hendrigo Alves de; Ohlsen, Daniel J.; Pannell, Caroline M.; Parris, Barbara S.; Pearce, Laura; Penneys, Darin S.; Perrie, Leon R.; Petoe, Peter; Poulsen, Axel Dalberg; Prance, Ghillean Τ.; Quakenbush, J. Peter; Raes, Niels; Rodda, Michele; Rogers, Zachary S.; Schuiteman, André; Schwartsburd, Pedro Bond; Scotland, Robert W.; Simmons, Mark P.; Simpson, David A.; Stevens, P. F.; Sundue, Michael; Testo, Weston; Trias‐Blasi, Anna; Turner, I. M.; Utteridge, Timothy M. A.; Walsingham, Lesley; Webber, Bruce L.; Wei, Ran; Weiblen, George D.; Weigend, Maximilian; Weston, Peter H.; Wilde, W; Wilkie, Peter; Wilmot‐Dear, C. M.; Wilson, Hannah; Wood, John R.; Zhang, Li Bing; Welzen, P.C. van

doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2549-5

Cited by 138 publications

(131 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

123

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We have not attempted any formal spatial priority setting here, though this is much needed and would be a valuable complement to our analysis. Such an exercise would reflect the new information generated over the last two decades (e.g., Volleringet al 2016, Cámara-Leret et al 2020) but will also be vital to highlight the many remaining unknowns (see e.g. Supriatna et al 1999).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…New Guinea, the world’s largest tropical island, covers just 0.53% of the Earth’s land (785,753 km 2 ), but is the most floristically diverse island in the world (Cámara-Leret et al 2020). It hosts extensive old growth forests, including extensive mangroves and peat swamps, in near pristine settings (Corlett and Primack 2011; Sasmito et al 2020).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Forest loss in Indonesian New Guinea: trends, drivers, and outlook

Dl¹,

Santos

Locatelli

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The rich forests of Indonesian New Guinea are threatened. We used satellite data to examine annual forest loss, road development and plantation expansion from 2001 to 2019, then developed a model to predict future deforestation in this understudied region. In 2019, 34.29 million hectares (Mha), or 83% of Indonesian New Guinea, supported old-growth forest. Over nineteen years, two percent (0.75 Mha) were cleared: 45% (0.34 Mha) converted to industrial plantations, roads, mine tailings, or other uses near cities; 55% (0.41 Mha) cleared by transient processes including selective natural timber extraction, inland water bodies-related processes, fires, and shifting agriculture. Industrial plantations expanded by 0.23 Mha, with the majority (0.21 Mha; 28% of forest loss) replacing forests and reaching 0.28 Mha in 2019 (97% oil palm; 3% pulpwood). The Trans-Papua Highway, a 4,000 km national investment project, increased by 1,554 km. Positive correlations between highway and plantations expansion indicate these are linked processes. Plantations and roads grew rapidly after 2011, peaked in 2015/16, and declined thereafter. Indonesian government allocated 2.62 Mha of land for the development of industrial plantations (90% oil palm 10% pulpwood) of which 74% (1.95 Mha) remained forest in 2019. A spatial model predicts that an additional 4.5 Mha of forest could be cleared by 2036 if Indonesian New Guinea follows similar relationships to Indonesian Borneo. We highlight the opportunities for policy reform and the importance of working with indigenous communities, local leaders, and provincial government to protect the biological and cultural richness still embodied in this remarkable region.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forest loss in Indonesian New Guinea: trends, drivers, and outlook

Dl¹,

Santos

Locatelli

et al. 2021

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…These ratios range from 1.6 staff per 100,000 specimens in Europe to a high of 11 staff per 100,000 specimens in the Pacific region. Some botanically diverse areas have few herbaria: the island of New Guinea has five herbaria, and a vascular plant flora of 13,634 species (Cámara‐Leret et al ., 2020), compared to the UK with 223 herbaria and vascular plant flora of around 7,400 native and naturalized species (BSBI, 2020).…”

Section: Herbaria and Fungariamentioning

confidence: 99%

Plant and fungal collections: Current status, future perspectives

Paton

Antonelli

Carine

et al. 2020

Plants People Planet

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We verified plant species taxonomy using recently published checklists to the vascular plants of the Americas 25 and New Guinea 26 . Using the list of medicinal plant species in each region, we queried the mega-tree GBOTB.-extended of Smith & Brown 27 with the phylo.maker function of the R package V.PhyloMaker 28 .…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

Cámara‐Leret

Bascompte

2020

Preprint

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There are nearly 7,400 languages in the world and over 30% of these will no longer be spoken by the end of the century1. So far, however, our understanding of whether language extinction may result in the loss of linguistically-unique knowledge remains limited. Here, we ask to what degree indigenous knowledge of medicinal plants is associated to individual languages and quantify how much indigenous knowledge may vanish as languages and plants go extinct. Focussing on three independent re-gions that have a high biocultural diversity —North America, northwest Amazonia, and New Guinea—we show that >75% of all 12,495 medicinal plant services are linguistically-unique, i.e., only known to one language. Whereas most plant species associated with linguistically-unique knowledge are not threatened, most languages that report linguistically-unique knowledge are. Our finding of high uniqueness in indigenous knowledge and strong coupling with threatened languages suggests that language loss will be even more critical to the extinction of medicinal knowledge than biodiversity loss.

show abstract

New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora

Cited by 138 publications

References 21 publications

Forest loss in Indonesian New Guinea: trends, drivers, and outlook

Forest loss in Indonesian New Guinea: trends, drivers, and outlook

Plant and fungal collections: Current status, future perspectives

Language extinction triggers the loss of unique medicinal knowledge

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About