assessments of vascular plant species among ecoregions

Aim (1) To determine the relative need for conservation assessments of vascular plant species among the world’s ecoregions given under-assessed species distributions; (2) to evaluate the challenge posed by the lack of financial resources on species assessment efforts; and (3) to demonstrate the utility of nonlinear mixed-effects models with both homoscedastic and heteroscedastic error structures in the identification of species-rich ecoregions. Location Global. Methods We identified the world’s ecoregions that contain the highest vascular plant species richness after controlling for area using species–area relationship (SAR) models built within a mixed-effects multi-model framework. Using quantitative thresholds, ecoregions with the highest plant species richness, historical habitat loss and projected increase in human population density were deemed to be most in need of conservation assessments of plant species. We used generalized linear models to test if countries that overlap with highly important ecoregions are poorer compared with others.

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