Madagascar in the global league tables
Fifth in the world for endemic plants, one of the highest endemism ratios anywhere, and among the least genetically studied. The numbers, and what they mean.
Where Madagascar sits
Ranked against every country on Earth, Madagascar's flora stands out in two ways at once: it is one of the largest bodies of endemic plants anywhere, and one of the most exclusive. Almost nothing that grows here grows anywhere else. The tables below draw on Kew's World Checklist of Vascular Plants, so every country is measured the same way.
By endemic count
The world's ten countries with the most endemic vascular plant species. The right-hand column, the share of each country's flora that is endemic, tells the deeper story.
| Rank | Country | Endemic species | Endemism ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Indonesia | 20,621 | 65% |
| 2 | Brazil | 15,326 | 42% |
| 3 | Australia | 13,111 | 60% |
| 4 | China | 12,305 | 36% |
| 5 | Madagascar | 9,829 | 83% |
| 6 | Chile | 9,159 | 31% |
| 7 | Peru | 7,420 | 36% |
| 8 | Mexico | 7,310 | 29% |
| 9 | Ecuador | 5,739 | 31% |
| 10 | Philippines | 4,931 | 52% |
Source: Kew World Checklist of Vascular Plants, January 2026. Native, non-extinct, non-introduced species.
The ratio is the point. The countries above Madagascar have more endemics, but most of those endemics also grow somewhere else. Madagascar's 83% means the opposite: for almost its entire flora, there is no other source anywhere on Earth. (IsoGentiX's own portal, which counts only species it can confirm as endemic, records 9,470 out of 14,356 catalogued.)
In most of the top-ranked countries, the endemics are also found elsewhere. In Madagascar, almost none are. Lose it here, and it is lost everywhere.
By density
Endemic species per 1,000 km² measures how tightly packed the diversity is. Small islands dominate, because the same species count over a smaller area scores higher.
| Rank | Country | Endemics / 1,000 km² | Total endemics |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Seychelles | 169.9 | 78 |
| 2 | Mauritius | 128.4 | 262 |
| 3 | Comoros | 94.9 | 212 |
| 4 | Samoa | 76.4 | 217 |
| 5 | Jamaica | 74.7 | 821 |
| … | … | … | … |
| 12 | Madagascar | 16.7 | 9,829 |
Source: WCVP January 2026, cross-referenced with World Bank land-area data.
Density flatters the tiny islands. The Seychelles tops the table with 78 endemic species; Madagascar sits 12th with 9,829, more than 120 times as many, spread across an island the size of France. On sheer scale of endemic life, few places come close.
The part we don't yet know
All of the above measures what has been named and described. A second question is how much of it has been read at the genetic level. The answer, worldwide, is startling: of the 362,739 accepted plant species on Earth, fewer than one in a hundred has any genome record at all. Most of the plant world is, in this sense, still unread.
Of Madagascar's roughly 9,500 endemic species, only a handful have a finished reference genome. Around 6,080 have no genetic record of any kind, in any public database. Another 3,363 have only a short "barcode" sequence, enough to tell species apart, but almost nothing about how they live. Together, that is about 96% of the island's endemic flora: named, but scientifically unread.
This is not a gap to regret. It is the reason the work exists. Every one of those unread species is a first look at something that evolved in isolation over tens of millions of years, and that grows nowhere else. Documenting it, before the forests that hold it shrink further, is how that knowledge is kept.