DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.15315644
title: Candidate hyperdominant tree species across the pan-tropics: taxonomic standardization of 1,116 species to World Flora Online

description: Cooper, Lewis, Sullivan et al. (2024) identified 1,116 candidate hyperdominant tree species that account for half of the tree abundance (totalling 800 billion trees with trunk diameters of at least 10 cm) in closed-canopy, structurally intact old-growth tropical forests in Africa, Amazonia and Southeast Asia. The authors list 1,119 species in their Supplementary Table 2, but three of these - Parinari excelsa, Symphonia globulifera and Theobroma cacao – occurred in more than one region.

Candidate hyperdominant tree species were assigned to one of three groups:



Group 1: Both hyperdominant in the full data and hyperdominant in the majority of subsamples even at very small sample sizes. These species are likely to be geographically widespread and abundant.

Group 2: Both hyperdominant in the full data and hyperdominant in the majority of subsamples, but at the smallest sample sizes only occasionally hyperdominant. These species are likely to be geographically widespread but not always abundant.

Group 3: Not quite hyperdominant in the full data, but hyperdominant in a substantial proportion of subsamples. These species are probably locally abundant but not necessarily geographically widespread.


 

Here I provide a dataset where these species were standardized to World Flora Online (Borsch et al. 2020; taxonomic backbone version 2023.12) by matching names with those in the Agroforestry Species Switchboard (Kindt et al. 2025; version 4). Species for which no matches could be found were standardized with the WorldFlora package (Kindt 2020), using similar R scripts and the same taxonomic backbone data as those used to standardize species names for the Switchboard.

There are additional fields to indicate that the species was included in the Tree Globally Observed Environmental Ranges database (TreeGOER; Kindt 2023) or in SilvaGRIS (https://fgr.apps.fao.org/en; accessed 28th March 2025). SilvaGRIS is a new global information system on forest genetic resources that makes available the data countries report to FAO for monitoring the implementation of the Global Plan of Action for the Conservation, Sustainable Use and Development of Forest Genetic Resources and for preparing global assessments on these resources.

 

References



Cooper, D.L.M., Lewis, S.L., Sullivan, M.J.P. et al. 2024. Consistent patterns of common species across tropical tree communities. Nature 625, 728–734. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06820-z  

Borsch, T., Berendsohn, W., Dalcin, E., Delmas, M., Demissew, S., Elliott, A., Fritsch, P., Fuchs, A., Geltman, D., Güner, A., Haevermans, T., Knapp, S., le Roux, M.M., Loizeau, P.-A., Miller, C., Miller, J., Miller, J.T., Palese, R., Paton, A., Parnell, J., Pendry, C., Qin, H.-N., Sosa, V., Sosef, M., von Raab-Straube, E., Ranwashe, F., Raz, L., Salimov, R., Smets, E., Thiers, B., Thomas, W., Tulig, M., Ulate, W., Ung, V., Watson, M., Jackson, P.W. and Zamora, N. 2020. World Flora Online: Placing taxonomists at the heart of a definitive and comprehensive global resource on the world's plants. TAXON, 69: 1311-1341. https://doi.org/10.1002/tax.12373

Roeland Kindt, Ilyas Siddique, Ian Dawson, Innocent John, Fabio Pedercini, Jens-Peter B. Lilleso, Lars Graudal. 2025. The Agroforestry Species Switchboard, a global resource to explore information for 107,269 plant species. bioRxiv 2025.03.09.642182; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.03.09.642182 

Kindt, R. 2020. WorldFlora: An R package for exact and fuzzy matching of plant names against the World Flora Online taxonomic backbone data. Applications in Plant Sciences 8(9): e11388. https://doi.org/10.1002/aps3.11388

Kindt, R. 2023. TreeGOER: A database with globally observed environmental ranges for 48,129 tree species. Global Change Biology, 29, 6303–6318. https://doi.org/10.1111/gcb.16914


 

Funding

The development of this dataset was supported by the German International Climate Initiative (IKI) to the regional tree seed programme on The Right Tree for the Right Place for the Right Purpose in Africa, by the Bezos Earth Fund to the Quality Tree Seed for Africa in Kenya and Rwanda project and by the Darwin Initiative to project DAREX001 of Developing a Global Biodiversity Standard Certification for Tree-Planting and Restoration.