Zee Media Bureau
New Delhi: Ranging from giant blue whale to microbial plants and animals, our home planet Earth could contain nearly 1 trillion species, according to the findings of a new research.
The Indiana University scientists revealed this fact and also highlighted that 99.999% of species are still undiscovered.
For this study, the scientists combined the datasets of all animal and plants available in government, academic and citizen science sources and made the largest compilation of its kind.
Altogether, these data represent more than 5.6 million microscopic and non-microscopic species from 35,000 locations across all the world's oceans and continents, except Antarctica.
"Our study combines the largest available datasets with ecological models and new ecological rules for how biodiversity relates to abundance. This gave us a new and rigorous estimate for the number of microbial species on Earth." said Jay Lennon.
The estimate, based on universal scaling laws applied to large datasets, appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
(With ANI inputs)
