In 2012 J. Bastow Wilson published a seminal paper in the Journal of Vegetation Science. It was about the world records of plant species richness. What is the maximum number of species ever found in a vegetation plot of a given size? As simple as it sounds, the paper returned unexpected results. When considering large plot sizes (e.g., 1 hectare) tropical forests were by far the richest communities, but for smaller sizes temperate grasslands and wooded meadows were way richer than tropical ecosystems. Species richness does not increase linearly with the plot size, and communities that are the richest in species for small plots, might not be the richest at larger sizes.
But how is species richness distributed across regions and ecosystems? Thanks to a team of 50 coauthors and thousands of data contributors, we tried to fill this knowledge gap in our latest paper, just published in Nature Communications.
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