Plants in peril

Kew and IUCN made a splash today with the Sampled Red List Index for Plants. A representative sample of 7,000 species of plants was selected from the comprehensive IUCN Red List Index for detailed monitoring. ¹ You can contribute to the Sampled Red List in a wiki-like environment, and follow its progress on the inevitable blog. An interactive map allows some basic exploration of the data. The headline number is that 25% of plant species are threatened. There are various crop wild relatives among the 7,000 species, ² so it might be possible to calculate some statistics for that particular category, to complement other efforts.

1. We’ll draw a discrete veil over Nature referring to gymnosperms as “seed-bearing plants,” tout court.
2. Though not Vavilovia.