Maximum Plant Species Diversity in Terrestrial Communities

THE ORTHODOX VIEW that tropical rain forest has the highest plant species diversity of any terrestrial plant community (Cain and Castro 1959; Walter 1971) has recently been challenged by Richards (1969), who suggests that some non-forest sclerophyll communities like the fynbosch of the Cape Peninsula of South Africa and similar communities in Australia may be even more species-rich. This hypothesis, now being widely referred to (e.g., Greig-Smith 1971), is tested here for the first time using previously unavailable data. Species-area curves including all vascular plant species were obtained from the most species-rich