Surprisingly, if a policy-maker or conservation
planner were to ask an ecologist the straightforward
question 'How many species of flowering plants are pollinated
by animals?' the answer would be: 'We do not know'

In order to provide an accurate estimate of the number
and proportion of biotically pollinated fl owering plant species
worldwide, we compiled a data set of published and unpublished
community-level surveys of plant–pollinator interactions
that quantified the means of pollination, whether by
animal or wind, for all plant species in the community.

Using a global mean across all data sets, without accounting
for the distribution of plant species in relation to latitude,
we find that 85.0% of flowering plants are biotically pollinated;
that is, 299,200 species, assuming a total figure of 352,000 
species of angiosperms

The high proportion of biotically pollinated flowering
plants reinforces concerns about the potential consequences
of pollinator losses for the world's flora.

If wild pollinator declines continue, we run the risk
of losing a substantial proportion of the world's flora.

from: How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals?
by: Jeff Ollerton, Rachael Winfree and Sam Tarrant
in: Oikos 120: 321–326, 2011

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