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Asked by wookiee to Amelia, Clem, Izzy, Sarah on 17 Mar 2014.
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Isabel Webb answered on 17 Mar 2014:
There are about 12,000 species of plant in Europe – but this is only a tiny amount of the estimated 320,000 plant species on Earth!!! These different plants vary in location – so the plants in cold places like Sweden are very different from the Mediterranean, like Greece. They also differ lots in shape and appearance, because they have adapted to grow in their different locations.
Of course, there are many species out there that we probably don’t know about yet, or new plants evolving! And at the same time, plants are going extinct at the same time. Some plants are only found in tiny numbers – like the Wollemi Pine, a tree which we have only ever found 12 of in the wild, all in the same place in Australia (but you can now see some new ones in places like the Cambridge Botanical Garden – there is a funny story about it nearly getting destroyed because somebody fell over onto it!!).
There are now projects to try and find all the plants species and save some seeds to try and make sure that we have copies before they go extinct. The Millenium Seed Bank in Kew is trying to do this – they have got about 75,000 different species so far.
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Sarah Harvey answered on 17 Mar 2014:
Izzy has already said that there are about 12000 species of plant in Europe which is tonnes! To give you an idea of how easy it is to find different species, we spent an afternoon in Portugal on our field trip trying to find as many different species of just one type of plant called Euphorbias. Even just narrowing our search to this one type of plant we already had about 50 species by the end of the afternoon! If we had included all plants rather than just Euphorbia species in this I think we’d have gone crazy!
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Amelia Frizell-Armitage answered on 17 Mar 2014:
As the others have told you people think there are around 12,000 species of plant in Europe. However, there are probably actually more than this as there are species that we still have not found yet.
The climate is changing at the moment, and because of this we will expect to see a big change in the number, and type, of plant species we have in Europe over the next 50-100 years. Some species will not be able to survive anymore in the new climate, and they will either have to adapt, or will go extinct. Other species that at the moment can’t survive in Europe will be able to – if their seeds come over to Europe by accident for example on a ship, or in some bird poo, they might be able to grow where they couldn’t before.
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