In article , Ted
Shoemaker writes

Can someone please tell me how many species of plants are estimated to
be living today?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/2082570.stm

Says over 400,000 *known* species. On the one hand, some revisions of
genera are reducing the number of species in those genera (others
aren't, e.g. IIRC, the recent revision of Sarcolaenaceae in Adansonia)
as species are reduced to synonymy. On the other hand, new species are
being discovered at an appreciable rate.

Angiosperms are the most diverse of plants; the other divisions have
well under 100,000 species between them. (28,000 on a site giving
235,000 for angiosperms.)

http://mentor.lscf.ucsb.edu/course/w...lecture_12.pdf

I'm not counting green algae (or other algae, or fungi, or
cyanobacteria) as plants.

Can that statistic be further broken down, either by phylum or by
geography (how many are native to each continent, for example)?


The Angiosperm Phylogeny Website has estimated species counts for each
family.

http://www.mobot.org/MOBOT/Research/APweb/welcome.html
--
Stewart Robert Hinsley