Number of Earth’s tree species estimated to be 14% higher than currently known | Hacker News Reader

Number of Earth’s tree species estimated to be 14% higher than currently known

news.umich.edu

93 pointsNotAWorkNick17 comments

So Ken M was onto something: https://i.imgur.com/8brpvZE.png

Please note that I was originally going to post a ranty shout about the Mods altering submitted article titles and then, upon reflection, I thought it best to ping Dan G an email (hn@ycombinator.com) directly (since that is absolutely usually the best way to resolve anything to do with anything, especially questions/rants that boil down to ‘Whah, Why did the HN mods do … xyz’)

/inserts self-deprecating humor alert

However. Upon further reflection of my reflectioning - I’ve decided to post the following in the hopes it will bring a smile to someone today rather than add an extra email to Dan's overflowing inbox :)

{Post Follows}

Ee Gads! [0]

I see that the submission pedants have been at work modifying the submitted article title which was originally to do with the number of undiscovered species.

I totally get the "Don't Editorialise" rule but when the entire article title is too long ("Number of Earth’s tree species estimated to be 14% higher than currently known, with some 9,200 species yet to be discovered") = Error of '44 Characters too long' and I decide to emphasize the 9,200 species yet to be discovered, finding that it has been altered (many hours after submission) to opt to highlight the first part then that is pedantry taken a step beyond the pale. Personal Opinion only of course.

[0] [Ee Gads] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/Ee+gads

Any statistical taxonomist worth his salt knows that the number is much closer to 8,700.

We counted all the trees we haven’t seen yet and got to 9200

Good one. If anyone else is curious, analyses like these usually bring in multiple types of data together, but often rely primarily on cluster sampling. Botanists will go to a specific plot of land and very thoroughly count the number of species (amongst many other metrics). These data points are abstracted (while taking into account factors like biome types of course) to obtain an distribution of expected species in different areas worldwide. We then take this figure and compare it with how many species we currently have documented

Accounting for all the different factors is obviously much more complex than what I described, but that's the gist of it

It seems like it would be very sensitive to outliers or just regular power law stuff where 1% of the biomes have 99% of the species-level diversity. If you that biome isn't one of the ones you thoroughly measure, you miscount: if it is, your efforts on the other biomes aren't actually that important.

Is not (just) unseen, is unclassified. Recognized as different stuff.

Everybody going to a coastal area in the west coast of US had seen Western gulls. The species split in the last decades by genetic analysis. Now we have western gulls and yellow-footed gulls. Same history with the European Herring gull and the Caspian gull. If you can still find a new species of big bird in California or Europe, hidden in plain sight, why not a shrub or a tree? There are plenty of ornithologists and much less people interested in botany, (not to mention virus, bacteria or fungus)

Several hybrids can become species also. Plants are clonal, so non fertile hybrids can still multiply and eventually became fertile. There are many species complex in trees that are really arcane. Oaks or Willows for example. Lots and lots of plants have changed its taxonomy in the last ten years.

Amusingly trees are like human races. They aren’t a meaningful biological category[1].

[1] https://eukaryotewritesblog.com/2021/05/02/theres-no-such-th...

It's true that "tree" and "Black" are both not meaningful biological categories but the reason why is very different. Trees evolved thousands of times and we have a large number of species that could either be shrubs or trees. The reason why our ideas of race are not meaningful biological categories is more similar to why certain "species" of citrus aren't meaningful categories. Because phylogenetic evidence turns out to show that the genetic distinction is not meaningful or distinct enough to separate them into separate taxons. Which could be to hybridization, or just plain lack of genetic differences

I'm not sure your link backs up the assertion. For example:

"Citrus fruits are all derived from a common fruit, and so are apples and pears, and plums and apricots – but an apple and an orange, or a fig and a peach, do not share a fruit ancestor."

What he's saying is that trees evolved convergently, i.e. "Convergent evolution is the independent evolution of similar features in species of different periods or epochs in time" (wikipedia). That's not the case (as far as I know) with humans, and human races.

I think what User23 meant was that our cultural constructs of race are usually based on some key phenotypical differences. A North African person is more closely related to Europeans on average than to a South African person yet they're usually classed as the same "race".

But you're right that User23 is still incorrect as that's not proof that melanin-rich skin evolved multiple times independently

Isn't it actually melanin-poor skin that evolved, assuming out-of-africa is true?

Melanin rich skin evolved at least twice probably. Blacks and Australian natives share similar melanin amounts but are different genetically.

Cool! Thanks for the link

Written like propaganda. There's more trees today than yesterday so calm down hippies things cant be that bad.

“Propaganda” from the University of Michigan, Purdue University, University of Bologna, and the National Academy of Sciences? Humans are as doomed as the trees.

Or was this one of those “humor” things I have heard sometimes appear here?

More species of tree, not more trees.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com