Extinction risk for Amazonian plants may be lower than previously estimated

Extinction risk for Amazonian plants may be lower than previously estimated
mongabay.com
July 06, 2009

Five to nine percent of the Amazon's 40,000 known species of plants will be at risk of extinction by 2050 should current deforestation trends continue, report researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The estimates are sharply lower than the 20 to 33 percent predicted in other studies.

Kenneth J. Feeley and Miles R. Silman of Wake Forest University used plant collections data and ecoregions maps to generate spatially explicit distributions for 40,027 species representing roughly 80% of the 50,000 plant species thought to live in the Amazon. They found that under a "business-as-usual" scenario where 12-24 percent of the Amazon was destroyed by 2050, only five to nine percent of plant species would become "committed to extinction" by mid-century.

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