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An inventory of plants for the land of the unexpected

New Guinea has the world’s richest island flora, according to the area’s first plant list catalogued by experts. Completing this list poses a formidable challenge that New Guineans are best placed to take up.
  1. Vojtech Novotny

    1. Vojtech Novotny is at the Biology Centre, Czech Academy of Sciences, and the University of South Bohemia, Ceske Budejovice 370 05, Czech Republic.

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  2. Kenneth Molem

    1. Kenneth Molem is at the New Guinea Binatang Research Center, Madang 511, Papua New Guinea.

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“I left my revolver at home, but I certainly did not forget my notebook and pencil,” wrote the anthropologist Nicholas Mikloucho-Maclay in 1871 when first visiting a New Guinean village1. His was one of the earliest long-term research residences on the island, not far from the village where one of us (K.M.) was born. The difficulty of exploring and understanding New Guinea has rarely been underestimated — it has rightly earned its name as ‘the land of the unexpected’. Writing in Nature, Cámara-Leret et al.2 have shed botanical light on the richness of species there by generating a checklist that provides an inventory of the island’s vascular plants (those with water-transporting tissues).

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Nature 584, 531-533 (2020)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02225-4

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