The commonness of rarity: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants

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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Item Type:	Article
Authors/Creators:	Enquist, BJ Feng, X Boyle, B Maitner, B Newman, EA Møller Jørgensen, P Roehrdanz, PR Thiers, BM Burger, JR Corlett, RT Couvreur, TLP Dauby, G Donoghue, JC Foden, W Lovett, JC https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5839-3770 Marquet, PA Merow, C Midgley, G Morueta-Holme, N Neves, DM Oliveira-Filho, AT Kraft, NJB Park, DS Peet, RK Pillet, M Serra-Diaz, JM Sandel, B Schildhauer, M Šímová, I Violle, C Wieringa, JJ Wiser, SK Hannah, L Svenning, J-C McGill, BJ
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information:	© 2019 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial License 4.0 (CC BY-NC). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, so long as the resultant use is not for commercial advantage and provided the original work is properly cited. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
Dates:	Accepted: 4 November 2019 Published (online): 27 November 2019 Published: 27 November 2019
Institution:	The University of Leeds
Academic Units:	The University of Leeds > Faculty of Environment (Leeds) > School of Geography (Leeds) > Ecology & Global Change (Leeds)
Depositing User:	Symplectic Publications
Date Deposited:	07 Nov 2019 11:49
Last Modified:	12 Dec 2019 15:10
Status:	Published
Publisher:	American Association for the Advancement of Science
Identification Number:	10.1126/sciadv.aaz0414
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID):	oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:153204

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The commonness of rarity: Global and future distribution of rarity across land plants

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