The DOI matches its Crossref record; 16 of the 16 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
How many species?
Abstract
This paper begins with a survey of the patterns in discovering and recording species of animals and plants, from Linnaeus' time to the present. It then outlines various approaches to estimating what the total number of species on Earth might be: these approaches include extrapolation of past trends; direct assessments based on the overall fraction previously recorded among newly studied groups of tropical insects; indirect assessment derived from recent studies of arthropods in the canopies of tropical trees (giving special attention to the question of what fraction of the species found on a given host-tree are likely to be ‘effectively specialized' on it); and estimates inferred from theoretical and empirical patterns in species-size relations or in food web structure. I conclude with some remarks on the broader implications of our ignorance about how many species there are.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
On the Relationship between Abundance and Distribution of Species
Brown, J. H. (1984) · The American Naturalist · doi:10.1086/284267 · Cited by 3,276
Genetic diversity in Sargasso Sea bacterioplankton
Giovannoni, S. J., Britschgi, T. B., Moyer, C. L., & Field, K. G. (1990) · Nature · doi:10.1038/345060a0 · Cited by 1,653
16S rRNA sequences reveal numerous uncultured microorganisms in a natural community
Ward, D. M., Weller, R., & Bateson, M. M. (1990) · Nature · doi:10.1038/345063a0 · Cited by 1,383
How Many Species Are There on Earth?
May, R. M. (1988) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.241.4872.1441 · Cited by 1,187
Self-citationDynamics of Regional Distribution: The Core and Satellite Species Hypothesis
Hanski, I. (1982) · Oikos · doi:10.2307/3544021 · Cited by 1,176
TROPICAL FORESTS: THEIR RICHNESS IN COLEOPTERA AND OTHER ARTHROPOD SPECIES
Erwin, T. L. (1982) · Smithsonian Digital Repository (Smithsonian Institution) · Cited by 950
Insect diversity: facts, fiction and speculation*
STORK, N. E. (1988) · Biological Journal of the Linnean Society · doi:10.1111/j.1095-8312.1988.tb00474.x · Cited by 512
Cohen, J. E., Briand, F., & Newman, C. M. (1990) · Biomathematics · doi:10.1007/978-3-642-83784-5 · Cited by 450
Introduction to Theoretical Ecology
Yodzis, P. (1989) · Cited by 449
May, R. M. (1990) · Nature · doi:10.1038/347129a0 · Cited by 443
Self-citation
Cited by
Estimating terrestrial biodiversity through extrapolation
Colwell, R. K., & Coddington, J. A. (1994) · Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rstb.1994.0091 · Cited by 4,530
Pimm, S. L., Russell, G. J., Gittleman, J. L., & Brooks, T. M. (1995) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.269.5222.347 · Cited by 2,230
Latitudinal Gradients in Species Diversity: The Search for the Primary Cause
Rohde, K. (1992) · Oikos · doi:10.2307/3545569 · Cited by 1,623
How Many Species of Insects and Other Terrestrial Arthropods Are There on Earth?
Stork, N. E. (2018) · Annual Review of Entomology · doi:10.1146/annurev-ento-020117-043348 · Cited by 1,537
Homage to Linnaeus: How many parasites? How many hosts?
Dobson, A., Lafferty, K. D., Kuris, A. M., Hechinger, R. F., & Jetz, W. (2008) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0803232105 · Cited by 760
Metadata
- Authors
- May, R. M.
- Venue
- Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences
- Publisher
- The Royal Society
- Published
- 1990-11-29
- Volume
- 330
- Issue
- 1257
- Pages
- 293-304
- ISSN
- 0962-8436 (ISSN-L)
- 1471-2970
- OpenAlex
- W306638812
- Cited by
- 395
- References
- 16
- FWCI
- 16.45
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: How many species? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1098/rstb.1990.0200
- The paper
- May, R. M. (1990). How many species? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.1990.0200
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
