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The world’s fast disappearing mangrove forests have low plant diversity and are often assumed to also have a species-poor insect fauna. We here compare the tropical arthropod fauna across a freshwater swamp and six different forest types (rain-, swamp, dry-coastal, urban, freshwater swamp, mangroves) based on 140,000 barcoded specimens belonging to ca. 8500 species. We find that the globally imperiled habitat “mangroves” is an overlooked hotspot for insect diversity.

A key feature of life’s diversity is that some species are common but many more are rare. Nonetheless, at global scales, we do not know what fraction of biodiversity consists of rare species. Here, we present the largest compilation of global plant diversity to quantify the fraction of Earth’s plant biodiversity that are rare. A large fraction, ~36.5% of Earth’s ~435,000 plant species, are exceedingly rare. Sampling biases and prominent models, such as neutral theory and the k-niche model, cannot account for the observed prevalence of rarity.

This Feasibility Study was undertaken by the Pacific Invasives Initiative (PII). The study was undertaken to determine the feasibility of managing invasive plant species suspected of threatening an area of lowland native forest on Kosrae island, Federated States of Micronesia. A proposed protection area within the forest has high biodiversity, water supply and cultural values.