For example, Myers (1984) reported that 7 crops provide 75% of human nutrition, Robert and Christine Prescott-Allen (1990) found that 103 species account for 90% of the global food supply, and Padulosi and Pignone (1997) documented only 150 commercialized species of edible plants around the world. Yet despite this vast endowment of edible plants, relatively few species have come to dominate human diets. Perhaps 3,000 (Shand 2005) to 6,000 (Chweya and Mnzava 1997) taxa of plants are still harvested with some regularity for use as food or in food products worldwide. Of these edible species, estimates of the numbers that have been used as food by people somewhere at some time range from 7,000 (FAO n.d.) to 12,000 (Kunkel 1984). Between 30,000 and 50,000 plants may be edible in some form to people (SEB n.d. It has been estimated that 369,000 species of flowering plants are known to science (RBG Kew 2016) and that the planet harbors somewhere between 400,000 (Gaston 2010) and perhaps 450,000 (Pimm and Joppa 2015) species of flowering plants total.
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