Our paper on the flora of New Guinea has just come out in Nature! This effort, headed by Rodrigo Cámara-Leret, included nearly 100 contributors, including myself. The goal of the paper was to generate the first-ever taxonomically verified species checklist for the island, which required a large group of taxonomic experts to achieve. I did the treatment for Lycopodiaceae and contributed to some fern families - a small task compared to that facing those who worked on families like Rubiaceae (784 species) or Orchidaceae (2856 species!!!).
It was a lot of fun to work on this project and I am so glad to see this sort of floristic work be published in such a prominent journal. There is still a lot (!) to do to understand New Guinean plant diversity, but this is a big step forward. You can read the paper here. Here is a very nice commentary on the paper that accompanied our paper in Nature - so far, more than 270 online news articles and commentaries have been published for our paper!
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AuthorPostdoc at the University of Gothenburg. I study plant diversity, with a focus on the evolution of ferns and lycophytes. |