ArticlePLoS biology2011
How many species are there on Earth and in the ocean?
Article in PLoS biology, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 585 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
585 citing papers in PubMed.
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- Environmental phylogenetics supports a steady diversification of crown eukaryotes starting from the mid-Proterozoic.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Past subarctic marine food web shifts recovered by sedaDNA and network analysis.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Global distribution of deep-sea natural products shows environmental and phylogenetic undersampling with potential for biodiscovery.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Surprising cryptic cavefish diversity in a long-studied karst cave ecosystem of northern Alabama.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Phase-Resolved Pupal Ecdysis Behavior and Requirement of Ecdysis-Triggering Hormone in Henosepilachna vigintioctomaculata.Archives of insect biochemistry and physiology · 2026Article
- OrthoFinder: improved phylogenetic orthology inference with enhanced accuracy and scalability.Nature methods · 2026Article
- Environmental DNA from pumped deep-sea water enables monitoring of deep-sea fish diversity.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Under Surveyed and Under Pressure: Additional Biodiversity Uncovered in the Freshwater Mussels (Unionida: Velesunioninae) of North-Western Australia.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- LepEU: A Consortium to Study the Population Genomics of Butterflies and Moths Across Europe.Evolutionary applications · 2026Article
- Earth's biodiversity: How much is there?Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Global biodiversity and the expanding Tree of Life.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Nine changes needed to deliver a radical transformation in biodiversity measurement.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- From Adam's rib: the Siberian moth's female W chromosome is derived from its Z counterpart.Molecular biology and evolution · 2026Article
- Cryogenic electron tomography by the numbers: Charting underexplored lineages in structural cell biology.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
525 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The diversity of life is one of the most striking aspects of our planet; hence knowing how many species inhabit Earth is among the most fundamental questions in science. Yet the answer to this question remains enigmatic, as efforts to sample the world's biodiversity to date have been limited and thus have precluded direct quantification of global species richness, and because indirect estimates rely on assumptions that have proven highly controversial. Here we show that the higher taxonomic classification of species (i.e., the assignment of species to phylum, class, order, family, and genus) follows a consistent and predictable pattern from which the total number of species in a taxonomic group can be estimated. This approach was validated against well-known taxa, and when applied to all domains of life, it predicts ~8.7 million (± 1.3 million SE) eukaryotic species globally, of which ~2.2 million (± 0.18 million SE) are marine. In spite of 250 years of taxonomic classification and over 1.2 million species already catalogued in a central database, our results suggest that some 86% of existing species on Earth and 91% of species in the ocean still await description. Renewed interest in further exploration and taxonomy is required if this significant gap in our knowledge of life on Earth is to be closed.
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