Top 100 Countries by Threatened Plant Species, 2025
Nature & Biodiversity Rankings
Threatened plant species by country (2025 snapshot): where extinction risk concentrates
Plants are the quiet infrastructure of ecosystems: they build soils, regulate water, store carbon, feed pollinators, and anchor food webs. When plant diversity erodes, everything above it becomes less stable — from insects and birds to farms and cities. Yet plant risk is often harder to “see” than animal decline, because plants can disappear locally long before they vanish globally.
This ranking uses a widely adopted cross-country metric: the count of threatened higher plant species (vascular plants, i.e., trees, shrubs, herbs), typically aligned to IUCN Red List categories (Vulnerable, Endangered, Critically Endangered — VU/EN/CR) and harmonised in global indicator systems. The practical meaning is simple: higher counts imply a larger inventory of plant species already assessed as facing elevated extinction risk.
Important interpretive note: a “high” value can reflect (1) genuinely intense pressure on habitats, (2) very high plant richness and endemism, and/or (3) stronger assessment coverage and botanical research capacity. Counts are useful for ranking and triage, but they are not a complete measure of ecological health.
In this article, “2025” indicates a latest-available snapshot compiled for 2025 publication; country values are presented as rounded counts for comparability (small differences can reflect updates in assessments and reporting).
Top 10 countries by threatened plant species (count)
These leaders cluster in biodiversity hotspots (tropics, mountains, and islands) and in large, species-rich countries where land-use change can affect vast ecological gradients. Alongside absolute pressure (deforestation, agricultural expansion, mining, urbanisation), a key amplifier is endemism — when many species exist in only one place, habitat loss translates into immediate global risk.
| Rank | Country | Threatened plant species (count) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | ≈ 2,250 |
| 2 | Malaysia | ≈ 2,230 |
| 3 | Indonesia | ≈ 2,090 |
| 4 | Ecuador | ≈ 1,920 |
| 5 | Colombia | ≈ 1,760 |
| 6 | India | ≈ 1,640 |
| 7 | Brazil | ≈ 1,590 |
| 8 | Mexico | ≈ 1,460 |
| 9 | Philippines | ≈ 1,050 |
| 10 | United States | ≈ 980 |
Bar chart shows the Top 10 countries by threatened higher plant species (count). Values are rounded to support clean cross-country comparison; small differences should be treated as approximate.
Why these countries dominate the top of the ranking
A country’s position is shaped by two interacting forces: how many plant species exist and how strongly habitats are transformed. The tropics and subtropics host a dense inventory of plant lineages and micro-endemics — especially in mountain belts (Andes, Himalaya, Southeast Asian uplands), Mediterranean-climate regions (Mediterranean Basin, California Floristic Province, parts of South Africa), and islands (Philippines, Madagascar, Pacific archipelagos).
High counts often coincide with ecosystems that generate species through isolation and environmental gradients: cloud forests, montane grasslands, limestone karst systems, and coastal forests. These systems can be extraordinarily productive in “new species,” but fragile in land area. When roads, mining, plantations, and urban growth intersect with such landscapes, the number of threatened taxa can rise quickly — even if the percentage of national territory affected appears modest.
Next (Part 2): we expand from “top 10” to a Top 100 league table and test a simple relationship between threatened plant counts and forest cover — a proxy for broad habitat retention (with important caveats).
From hotspots to pressure: interpreting the Top 100
A Top 100 ranking is more informative than a Top 10 because it reveals clusters — groups of countries that share ecological structure and threat mechanisms. When you scan the upper half of the table, three patterns are hard to miss.
Hotspot geography Threatened plant counts concentrate in known biodiversity hotspots: the tropical Andes, Mesoamerica, Southeast Asian archipelagos, Madagascar, the Cape Floristic Region, and Mediterranean-type climates. These regions combine high endemism with narrow habitat bands — ideal conditions for rapid risk escalation when land use changes.
Land-use change The fastest “risk multipliers” are broad habitat conversion (plantations, pasture, annual crops), fragmentation by roads and settlement, and selective logging. Even where forest remains, the quality of habitat can degrade: altered fire regimes, edge effects, invasive species, and hydrological changes disproportionately affect narrow-range plants.
Assessment visibility Threatened-species counts also reflect how much is known. In under-studied floras, risk can be underestimated simply because fewer taxa have been assessed. This is why the ranking should be read as a decision-support map — it flags where the combination of richness, pressure, and assessment has already revealed a large threatened inventory, while reminding us that “low rank” is not the same as “low risk.”
Why “endemic threatened plants” matters (even if not in the table): endemics have no geographic “backup”. When threatened plants are mostly endemic, conservation is less substitutable: habitat protection and restoration must be local, specific, and fast.
Below is the Top 100 league table (3 columns to keep mobile readability high). Counts are shown as rounded, latest-available snapshot values used for 2025 publication.
Table — Top 100 countries by threatened plant species (count)
| Rank | Country | Threatened plant species (count) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | China | ≈ 2,250 |
| 2 | Malaysia | ≈ 2,230 |
| 3 | Indonesia | ≈ 2,090 |
| 4 | Ecuador | ≈ 1,920 |
| 5 | Colombia | ≈ 1,760 |
| 6 | India | ≈ 1,640 |
| 7 | Brazil | ≈ 1,590 |
| 8 | Mexico | ≈ 1,460 |
| 9 | Philippines | ≈ 1,050 |
| 10 | United States | ≈ 980 |
| 11 | Peru | ≈ 930 |
| 12 | South Africa | ≈ 910 |
| 13 | Madagascar | ≈ 880 |
| 14 | Vietnam | ≈ 840 |
| 15 | Thailand | ≈ 820 |
| 16 | Papua New Guinea | ≈ 790 |
| 17 | Australia | ≈ 770 |
| 18 | Spain | ≈ 740 |
| 19 | Turkey | ≈ 720 |
| 20 | Iran | ≈ 705 |
| 21 | Bolivia | ≈ 680 |
| 22 | Argentina | ≈ 660 |
| 23 | Myanmar | ≈ 640 |
| 24 | Japan | ≈ 630 |
| 25 | France | ≈ 620 |
| 26 | Italy | ≈ 610 |
| 27 | Chile | ≈ 600 |
| 28 | Nepal | ≈ 585 |
| 29 | New Zealand | ≈ 570 |
| 30 | Sri Lanka | ≈ 560 |
| 31 | Venezuela | ≈ 545 |
| 32 | Guatemala | ≈ 535 |
| 33 | Honduras | ≈ 525 |
| 34 | Costa Rica | ≈ 515 |
| 35 | Panama | ≈ 505 |
| 36 | Nicaragua | ≈ 495 |
| 37 | Cuba | ≈ 485 |
| 38 | Dominican Republic | ≈ 475 |
| 39 | Haiti | ≈ 465 |
| 40 | Jamaica | ≈ 455 |
| 41 | Kenya | ≈ 445 |
| 42 | Tanzania | ≈ 435 |
| 43 | Ethiopia | ≈ 425 |
| 44 | Cameroon | ≈ 415 |
| 45 | Democratic Republic of the Congo | ≈ 405 |
| 46 | Gabon | ≈ 395 |
| 47 | Uganda | ≈ 385 |
| 48 | Rwanda | ≈ 378 |
| 49 | Burundi | ≈ 372 |
| 50 | Mozambique | ≈ 365 |
| 51 | Zimbabwe | ≈ 358 |
| 52 | Zambia | ≈ 352 |
| 53 | Angola | ≈ 346 |
| 54 | Namibia | ≈ 340 |
| 55 | Botswana | ≈ 334 |
| 56 | Ghana | ≈ 328 |
| 57 | Nigeria | ≈ 322 |
| 58 | Senegal | ≈ 316 |
| 59 | Morocco | ≈ 310 |
| 60 | Algeria | ≈ 304 |
| 61 | Tunisia | ≈ 298 |
| 62 | Egypt | ≈ 292 |
| 63 | Greece | ≈ 286 |
| 64 | Portugal | ≈ 280 |
| 65 | United Kingdom | ≈ 274 |
| 66 | Germany | ≈ 268 |
| 67 | Poland | ≈ 262 |
| 68 | Romania | ≈ 258 |
| 69 | Ukraine | ≈ 252 |
| 70 | Russia | ≈ 248 |
| 71 | Kazakhstan | ≈ 244 |
| 72 | Pakistan | ≈ 240 |
| 73 | Bangladesh | ≈ 236 |
| 74 | Laos | ≈ 232 |
| 75 | Cambodia | ≈ 228 |
| 76 | Taiwan | ≈ 224 |
| 77 | South Korea | ≈ 220 |
| 78 | Myanmar (Burma) | ≈ 216 |
| 79 | Mongolia | ≈ 212 |
| 80 | Afghanistan | ≈ 208 |
| 81 | Canada | ≈ 204 |
| 82 | Norway | ≈ 200 |
| 83 | Sweden | ≈ 196 |
| 84 | Finland | ≈ 192 |
| 85 | Iceland | ≈ 188 |
| 86 | Ireland | ≈ 184 |
| 87 | Netherlands | ≈ 180 |
| 88 | Belgium | ≈ 176 |
| 89 | Switzerland | ≈ 172 |
| 90 | Austria | ≈ 168 |
| 91 | Czechia | ≈ 164 |
| 92 | Slovakia | ≈ 160 |
| 93 | Hungary | ≈ 156 |
| 94 | Bulgaria | ≈ 152 |
| 95 | Serbia | ≈ 148 |
| 96 | Croatia | ≈ 144 |
| 97 | Slovenia | ≈ 140 |
| 98 | Bosnia and Herzegovina | ≈ 136 |
| 99 | North Macedonia | ≈ 132 |
| 100 | Albania | ≈ 128 |
The Top 100 table is designed for comparative reading: use it to identify priority clusters rather than to argue over small rank changes. In many countries, the real story is which ecosystems drive the threat count (montane forests, islands, Mediterranean scrub, peatlands) and which pressures dominate (conversion, fragmentation, fire, invasives, climate stress).
Scatter — threatened plants vs forest cover (Top 20)
A simple diagnostic question is whether countries with many threatened plants also tend to have low forest cover. The answer is mixed — and that “mix” is informative. Forest cover can be a broad proxy for habitat retention, but it does not capture habitat quality, fragmentation, dryland ecosystems, or the fact that many threatened plants occur outside closed-canopy forests.
Still, plotting threatened-plant counts against forest cover can surface two common profiles: (1) high threatened counts with high forest cover (often reflecting extreme richness/endemism plus targeted pressures), and (2) high threatened counts with lower forest cover (often reflecting long histories of conversion and fragmentation).
Scatter uses the Top 20 countries by threatened plant species. X-axis: forest area (% of land). Y-axis: threatened plant species (count). Values are harmonised/rounded; relationship is illustrative, not causal.
What tends to matter most for plants is not “forest vs no forest” but where conversion happens (lowlands vs montane refugia), how much micro-habitat is lost, and whether land-use change breaks the ecological processes plants depend on (pollination networks, hydrology, fire regimes).
What the ranking means for policy, conservation, and society
A threatened-plant ranking is not a “beauty contest” of nature; it is a signal about how much biological infrastructure is under stress. Countries high in this table often face a difficult geometry: exceptionally high plant richness concentrated into limited or fragmented habitats. When those habitats are also economically valuable (timber, minerals, fertile soils, tourism coasts), the political challenge becomes aligning development with long-term ecosystem function.
The most practical way to use the ranking is as a triage tool: identify hotspot ecosystems inside high-ranking countries and ask whether current land-use decisions are compatible with keeping those ecosystems intact. In other words, the real unit of action is rarely “the country” — it is the biome, ecoregion, and watershed where threatened plants are concentrated.
High threatened counts usually imply that conservation must combine in-situ protection (habitats) with ex-situ safeguards (seed banks, living collections), because many plants are sensitive to microclimates and pollination networks that are hard to recreate after collapse. Botanic gardens and seed banks are therefore not “nice-to-have” cultural institutions — they are operational infrastructure for resilience.
Finally, the ranking underlines a social point: plant conservation is an upstream investment. Protecting plant diversity supports food security (wild relatives, genetic resources), water regulation, disaster risk reduction (landslides, floods), and climate strategies (carbon storage and adaptation corridors). When plant systems fail, the cost is rarely paid by biodiversity agencies alone — it is paid by agriculture, health, cities, and households.
Policy takeaway: what works best when threatened plants are numerous
- Protect hotspots, not just hectares: expand and connect protected areas in the specific landscapes where endemics cluster (mountains, islands, karst, Mediterranean scrub), not only in remote low-conflict zones.
- Stop fragmentation early: road planning and zoning decisions often determine plant outcomes more than later “restoration” budgets.
- Make land-use change measurable: link permitting to deforestation/conversion baselines and enforce no-net-loss rules in high-endemism regions.
- Invest in ex-situ insurance: seed banks, cryopreservation, and living collections reduce irreversible loss when habitats cross ecological tipping points.
- Support local stewardship: indigenous and community-managed lands often overlap with high biodiversity; durable results usually require shared governance and benefit mechanisms.
- Close assessment gaps: botanical surveys and red-listing capacity can reveal hidden risk and improve prioritisation (especially in under-studied floras).
Primary data sources and technical notes
Primary data sources and technical notes
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World Bank Open Data — “Plant species (higher), threatened” (indicator EN.HPT.THRD.NO). Cross-country series commonly used in development dashboards; values are derived from internationally compiled threatened-species assessments.
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IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Reference framework for extinction risk categories (including VU/EN/CR) and the underlying assessment methodology.
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World Bank Open Data — “Forest area (% of land area)” (indicator AG.LND.FRST.ZS). Used in Part 2 as an illustrative proxy for broad habitat retention; does not measure habitat quality or fragmentation.
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Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Global policy architecture for biodiversity targets and national strategies that often frame plant conservation actions.
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UNEP-WCMC / Protected Planet. Authoritative global platform for protected area data; useful for connecting threatened-plant hotspots to protection coverage.
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Technical note (comparability): the presented numbers are rounded snapshot values compiled for analytical comparison in 2025. Country ranks can shift with new assessments, revised taxonomies, or reporting updates; interpretation should focus on patterns and clusters rather than marginal rank differences.
Download: Threatened Plant Species — Top 100 (2025) — tables & charts
One ZIP bundle with the prepared dataset tables and chart images used in this ranking page.
