There’s news from Kew that its GIS Unit has an interactive map out looking at the geographic distribution of plant diversity at the genus and family level. Here’s how they did it:
For each genus of flowering plants, distributions were compiled principally from the specimens held in Kew’s Herbarium. In addition, standard reference floras and checklists for each region of the world (as far as possible) were consulted for doubtful distribution records (such as only one or a few specimens of any genus from a particular region, or doubtfully identified specimens). Many hundreds of individual articles were also consulted, and whether or not a genus was native, doubtfully native, doubtfully present or introduced was noted. Only presence has been recorded; regions from which a genus is absent are not listed, and there is no record of abundance, extent of distribution within regions, or numbers of species either of genera or within regions.
It’s nice enough and all, but I don’t really understand it. I mean, why use those funny regions? Why not proper ecoregions? What’s wrong with just using countries? Anyway, it would be interesting to know if something similar is being planned for the plants conserved in the Millennium Seed Bank, which was coincidentally in the news again this week. Or, indeed, with the material conserved by the international genebanks of the CGIAR system, data on which is to be found in the SINGER database.
Hmm, I think what you call funny regions are probably proper biogeographic regions as opposed to ecoregions. While ecoregions are based on biotas’ response to climatic conditions, biogeographic regions are based on the evolutionary history of biotas. This kind of map depicts the plant’s eye view of geography as opposed to geography’s eye view of plants. Something like that.
If they were biogeographic regions, they would not coincide with country boundaries, would they?
Good point. So they are funny then.