www.telegraph.co.uk 20th September 2010
Image sourced from http://www.britannica.com
Scientists from the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew have carried out the most comprehensive assessment ever of the list of flowering plant species in the world. It has taken the research team three years to finish the study and they enlisted the help of almost 200 governments. They concluded that as many as 600,000 species were actually ‘duplicates of already categorised plants’. The mistakes included 790 different entries for the tomato and 600 different names for the oak tree and its varieties. Having multiple entries for any one species is detrimental for scientific research as one entry may contain information another one doesn’t. The full results of the project are to be announced at the end of the year but statistics currently stand at 301,000 accepted species, 480,000 alternative names, and 240,000 left to assess.
