Context

• The island of New Guinea, the world’s second-largest in area and the largest tropical island, has the globe’s richest collection of plants, a study by the University of Zurich in Switzerland.

Key Details

• The number of plant species that the list enumerates — 13,634 — is 20 per cent more species than Madagascar or Borneo.
• The plant family with the maximum number of species is orchids while a third of the species are trees.
• Some 68 per cent of the plants in the list are endemic and not found anywhere else in the world.

Back to Basics

New Guinea:

• New Guinea is an island of the eastern Malay Archipelago, in the western Pacific Ocean,north of Australia.
• It is bounded by the Pacific Oceanto the north, the Bismarck and Solomon seas to the east, the Coral Sea and Torres Strait to the south, and the Arafura Sea to the southwest.
• It is world’s second-largest in area and the largest tropical island.