Floristic map of the world
Floristic and zoological regions are fundamental in ecological and evolutionary studies. While zoogeographic regions have been updated recently, currently used floristic maps still reflect similarities between endemic flora rather than phylogenetic relatedness between complete floras. Flowering plants (angiosperms) are one of the most diverse organismal groups on earth. They dominate in most terrestrial ecosystems and serve as both major food source and habitat for many other organisms. Because of their major impact on terrestrial ecosystems and other organisms, understanding the spatial organization of floras is essential in order to address the general process that drive plant species diversity and distribution in general. Thus, update of global floristic regionalization is both timely and necessary. In our study we integrate phylogeny and distribution information of Angiosperm genera to update the world floristic map.About the study
We used a dated phylogeny of 12,778 flowering plant genera and global dataset on their distribution to update the global floristic regions and explored the evolution of floristic regions over time and the main drivers that have led to their formation.
Chaenomeles japonica (Rosaceae) Location: Beijing, China (30m) Photo: Nawal Shrestha
GIS maps of the updated world floristic regions
Our analyses resulted in a floristic regionalization that contains eight floristic realms and 16 nested sub-realms. A GIS version of this map can be downloaded using the following link (Requires ArcGIS or other software that can open .shp files):
Phylogeny of flowering plant genera
To build our phylogentic tree of all flowering plants genera we took advantage of publicly available resources such as GenBank.
We used a sophisticated algorithm to extract and evaluate the quality of the DNA sequence data that was used to build our molecular phylogenetic tree.
OneZoom phylogeny and resource browser
The tree used in the analyses presented in the main text of our manuscript can be explored here using the OneZoom tree visualization tool. The tree browser provides also links to additional information from various open access online sources such as Wikipedia and the Encyclopedia of Life. This rich additional content makes it also a great tool for educational purposes. In addition the tree topologies in newick format are also available thought the links on the right of this page.
We used the information from the fossil record to date our tree and a polytomy resolver to add the taxa that were not represented in our DNA data matrix.
Data sources
To construct the global distribution of flowering plants, we compiled more than 1,300 data sources, including published floras, herbarium specimen records, online databases, and other botanical literature. The distributional data can be downloaded as a .xlsx formatted file here:
The main data sources are:
- Plants of the world online (http://www.plantsoftheworldonline.org/)
- Catalogue of Life annual-checklist 2018 (http://www.catalogueoflife.org/annual-checklist/2018/)
- eFloras
- Kew's data and resources concerning plants (https://www.kew.org/science/data-and-resources/plants)
- Tropicos (http://www.tropicos.org/), Missouri Botanical Garden's electronic databases during the past 30 years
- The Internal Legume Database & Information Service (ILDIS, http://ildis.org/ )
- Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF, https://www.gbif.org/ )
- The Angiosperm Flora of India (beta version, http://flora.indianbiodiversity.org/)
- The Euro+Med PlantBase (http://www.emplantbase.org/home.html), an on-line database and information system for the vascular plants of Europe and the Mediterranean region
- National Specimen Information Infrastructure (NSII, http://www.nsii.org.cn), including over 6 million digitized plant specimens of China.
- Flora Reipublicae Popularis Sinicae.
- Chinese Virtual Herbarium (CVH, http://www.cvh.ac.cn/), including digitalized provincial floras of China.
- The PLANTS Database (https://plants.usda.gov/) provides standardized information about the vascular plants, mosses, liverworts, hornworts, and lichens of the U.S. and its territories.
- African Plant Database ( http://www.ville-ge.ch/musinfo/bd/cjb/africa/index.php?langue=an), including distribution maps for over 50,000 species of Africa.
- Flora of U.S.S.R. (vol. 1-30)
- CANBR and ANBG databases ( https://www.anbg.gov.au/cpbr/databases/), including all botanical databases of Australia.
- Flora do Brasil 2020 ( http://floradobrasil.jbrj.gov.br/), including province level distribution of over 30, 000 angiosperm species in Brazil.
In addition to data already available in digital format, we directly digitized records from numerous printed regional and local floras. The taxonomic nomenclatures of different sources were standardized according to The Plant List and the Catalogue of Life annual-checklist 2018.
