Large-scale patterns of plant diversity and conservation priorities in South East Asia

In the absence of a complete floristic inventory, conservation priorities within South East Asia must often be based on incomplete knowledge or a rough approximation of diversity such as habitat cover. To help overcome this, a database containing distribution data for all 3 523 known flowering plant genera across 53 geo-political regions covering all of Indo-China, Malesia and the Pacific has been compiled from regional floras and herbarium specimens at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Our database is currently 85 % complete and has been used in this preliminary analysis to show the broad patterns of plant diversity and floristic relationships in the South East Asian region. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the floristic richness, at genus level across the region, the relationships between the different areas and to highlight the areas within the region that are of most pressing conservation concern.