The London-based Botanic Gardens Conservation International has published the State of the World’s Tree report, which was undertaken over the past five years by 500 experts to compile extinction risk information for 58,497 tree species worldwide.
Salient features of the report:
- Around 18 per cent of India’s tree species stare at the possibility of extinction.
- India is home to 650 endemic tree species, of which 650 are endemic or native to certain parts of the country and 469 of them are threatened.
- Around 30 per cent of tree species around the world are threatened with extinction.
- The report also found that at least 142 tree species are already extinct in the wild.
- About a third of the tree species found in the Indo-Malaya (Tropical Asia) biogeographic realm of which India is a part, have not been evaluated and data about them is deficient.
- Other than Indo-Malaya and Oceania, the Afrotropics (Africa south of the Sahara, including Madagascar) have the highest proportion of threatened tree species.
- The world has 58,497 tree species. The Neotropics (Central and South America) have the largest number of tree species with 23,631 tree species.
- The country with highest tree diversity is Brazil with 8,847 tree species, followed by Colombia. New Zealand, Madagascar and New Caledonia (all islands) have the greatest proportion of endemic tree species with over 90% of species being found nowhere else.
