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 The big bad plant guy, Peter Raven. What a hero!
What about plants? Plant habitat continues to be fragmented and eliminated with extreme rapidity all over the globe and especially in the tropics. If one were to estimate plant extinction rates, it's pretty ridiculous not to include the tropics. That's where most plant species live. World Plants Near Exctinction Close to 50%- Study Friday, November 1, 2002, (Reuters) - "The percentage of the world's plants threatened with extinction is much larger than is commonly believed, and could be as high as 47 percent if tropical species are included, researchers said on Thursday. The study published in the November issue of Science, challenges earlier research that estimated the number of species in danger of extinction was about 13 percent. Previous studies of extinct plants underestimated the numbers because they failed to include many plants growing in tropical countries such as Ecuador and Colombia." More...  Fragmentation doesn't look so bad. What the heck, it's still pretty green, isn't it?

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