ArticleScience advances2019
The commonness of rarity: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants.
Article in Science advances, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 96 papers, 2 of them syntheses that pooled it.
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Who cites it
96 citing papers in PubMed, 2 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Geographic, Taxonomic and Metric Gaps in Biodiversity Research Limit Evidence-Based Conservation in Agricultural Landscapes: An Umbrella Review.Ecology letters · 2025Pooled it
- Traditional Medicinal Plants as a Source of Antituberculosis Drugs: A System Review.BioMed research international · 2021Pooled it
- From plankton to fish: 21st-century redistribution of marine biodiversity and the changing role of rare species.Science advances · 2026Article
- Global Patterns and Drivers of Climatic Niche Originality and Overlap: Disentangling Ecological From Methodological Signals.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Using reflectance spectra and Pl@ntNet to identify herbarium specimens: a case study with Lithocarpus.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Agricultural intensification, microbial homogenization and loss of rare microbiota.Nature reviews. Microbiology · 2026Review
- Ecological niche modeling reveals habitat differentiation and climatic vulnerability in two imperiled, sympatric southern Appalachian carnivorous plants.American journal of botany · 2026Article
- A hierarchical approach for finding undiscovered populations of an endangered bumble bee.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- CartograPlant: bridging genomic, phenotypic, and environmental data to advance plant resilience and eco-evolutionary insight.Genetics · 2026Article
- Informing spatial conservation prioritization with species' traits.Conservation biology : the journal of the Society for Conservation Biology · 2026Article
- The relative role of regional species pools in determining tree species richness and rarity in Chinese subtropical and tropical forests.Plant diversity · 2026Article
- Beyond species means - the intraspecific contribution to global wood density variation.The New phytologist · 2026Article
- Estimating species commonness and prevalence through unsupervised methods.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Fluctuating Growth Rates Link Turnover and Unevenness in Species-Rich Communities.Ecology letters · 2026Article
- Global functional shifts in trees driven by alien naturalization and native extinction.Nature plants · 2026Article
- Lessons learned using species' distribution models for conservation planning in the Golden Gate Biosphere reserve.PloS one · 2026Article
- Lidar reveals distinct insect daily activity and diversity between habitats.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- General laws of biodiversity: Climatic niches predict plant range size and ecological dominance globally.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Testing predictions of spatial segregation of the sexes and life-history theory in three species of the dioecious genus Baccharis L. from southeastern Brazil.Plant biology (Stuttgart, Germany) · 2025Article
- Article
36 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
35 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A key feature of life's diversity is that some species are common but many more are rare. Nonetheless, at global scales, we do not know what fraction of biodiversity consists of rare species. Here, we present the largest compilation of global plant diversity to quantify the fraction of Earth's plant biodiversity that are rare. A large fraction, ~36.5% of Earth's ~435,000 plant species, are exceedingly rare. Sampling biases and prominent models, such as neutral theory and the k-niche model, cannot account for the observed prevalence of rarity. Our results indicate that (i) climatically more stable regions have harbored rare species and hence a large fraction of Earth's plant species via reduced extinction risk but that (ii) climate change and human land use are now disproportionately impacting rare species. Estimates of global species abundance distributions have important implications for risk assessments and conservation planning in this era of rapid global change.
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