Abstract
Background The Sunda-Sahul Convergence Zone, defined here as the area comprising Australia, New Guinea, and Southeast Asia (Indonesia to Myanmar), straddles the Sunda and Sahul continental shelves and is one of the most biogeographically famous and important regions in the world. Floristically, it is thought to harbour a large amount of the world’s diversity. Despite the importance of the area, a checklist of the flora has never before been published. Here we present the first working checklist of vascular plants for the Sunda-Sahul Convergence Zone. The list was compiled from 24 flora volumes, online databases and unpublished plot data. Taxonomic nomenclature was updated, and each species was coded into nested biogeographic regions. The list includes 60,415 species in 5,135 genera and 363 families of vascular plants. New information This is the first species-level checklist of the region and presents an updated census of the region’s floristic biodiversity. The checklist confirms that species richness of the SSCZ is comparable to that of the Neotropics, and highlights areas in need of further documentation and taxonomic work. This checklist provides a novel dataset for studying floristic ecology and evolution in this biogeographically important region of very high global biodiversity.
Highlights
The Sahul continental shelf comprises Australia and the island of New Guinea, while the Sunda continental shelf comprises mainland Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Peninsular Malaysia) and Indonesia west of Wallace’s Line
An estimated 374,000 vascular plant species are known globally (Christenhusz and Byng 2016); our checklist indicates that the Sunda-Sahul Convergence Zone” (SSCZ) harbours at least 16.2% of all known vascular plant species
Considering the land area of the SSCZ (c. 12,215,000 km2, c. 8% of the global land area), our estimated diversity for the region is substantially higher than the global average number of species per unit area
Summary
The Sunda-Sahul Convergence Zone, defined here as the area comprising Australia, New Guinea, and Southeast Asia (Indonesia to Myanmar), straddles the Sunda and Sahul continental shelves and is one of the most biogeographically famous and important regions in the world. We present the first working checklist of vascular plants for the SundaSahul Convergence Zone. The list includes 60,415 species in 5,135 genera and 363 families of vascular plants. This is the first species-level checklist of the region and presents an updated census of the region’s floristic biodiversity. This checklist provides a novel dataset for studying floristic ecology and evolution in this biogeographically important region of very high global biodiversity.
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