Plant facts & figures

Simple up-to-date global facts about plants . . . the number of species, their biomass, and so forth, can be difficult to find. I have assembled this kind of information here (in one place) for those who might find it useful. Please keep me up-to-date with any errors or omissions.

A collection of information on plants in Australia prepared at the Australian National Botanic Gardens, Canberra, is available here.

Biomass

Biomass as carbon content (factors out water) in gigatons of carbon (GtC).^[1]

Plants comprise 80% of all the carbon stored in living organisms. Plants are mainly terrestrial, animals mainly marine, bacteria and archaea mostly deep subsurface. Terrestrial biomass is two orders of magnitude greater than marine. Human biomass is an order of magnitude greater higher than that of all wild mammals combined. Humans and their livestock outweigh wild mammals >20-fold. Domesticated fowl exceeds all other birds. In the last 10,000 years humans have halved wild plant biomass. The seas are mostly occupied by microbes, mainly bacteria and protists (≈70% total marine biomass, the remaining ≈30% mostly arthropods and fish). The deep subsurface holds ≈15% of the total biomass in the biosphere (mostly surface-attached bacteria and archaea). ^[1]

Collections

Herbaria

Botanic gardens

Conservation

Human activities are accelerating the rate of biodiversity loss such that two in five plant species is threatened with extinction.^[2]

Food

Medicinal plants

Primary productivity

Human appropriation of net primary productivity (HANPP)

Species number

The total number of species in the world is extremely difficult to determine. Current estimates range between 8 and 10 million.

The World Flora Online (WFO) is a consortium of leading botanical institutions worldwide aiming to achieve an online Flora of all known plants in line with the 2011-2020 Global Strategy for Plant Conservation Target 1. No breakdown of numbers by taxonomic category is available yet.

The following are the numbers of accepted species listed in the former Plant List which follows the Kew taxonomic system of classification. It is still a work in progress.

See also Christenhusz, M.J.H. & Byng, J.W. 2016. The number of known plant species in the world and its annual increase. Phytotaxa 261(3): 201-217

Kew’s Plants of the World Online provides authoritative information of the world’s flora. It was launched in March 2017.

Largest

A clonal giant seagrass meadow of Posidonia australis in the shallow waters of Shark Bay, near Carnarvon, Western Australia is about 4,500 years old and measuring 180 kilometres across

Edgeloe, J.M. et al. 2022. Extensive Polyploid Clonality was a Successful Strategy for Seagrass to Expand into a Newly Submerged Environment Proceedings Royal Society B: 289(1976)

Trees

Number

Fastest growing

Fastest growing – bamboo 91 cm (35 in) per day or at a rate of 0.00003 km/h (0.00002 mph).^[10]

Greatest volume

Volume Sequoiadendron giganteum, Giant Redwood (General Sherman), Sequoia National Park, California. 52,508 cu ft. Probably the world’s largest individual organism. ^[11]

Oldest

Oldest tree >4,700 years, Pinus longaeva Bristlecone Pine (Methuselah), White Mountain Range, California
(c. 4,900 Pinus longaeva Bristlecone Pine (Prometheus), Nevada cut down in 1964)^[11]

Oldest clonal tree Picea abies, Norway Spruce (Pando), in Sweden 9,550 years. Populus tremuloides, Quaking Aspen (Pando), Utah, c. 80,000 years and >6000 tons. ^[11]

List of the world’s oldest trees.

Tallest

Widest girth

11.6 m (38 ft) Widest girth in the world is the Arbol del Tule, a Montezuma cypress (Taxodium mucronatum) located in Oaxaca, Mexico.

Media Gallery

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First published on the internet – 21 October 2020

The Community of Life
Showing biological divisions, geological ages and major evolutionary events
Courtesy Evogeneao https://www.evogeneao.com