How many flowering plants are pollinated by animals?

It is clear that the majority of flowering plants are pollinated by insects and other animals, with a minority utilising abiotic pollen vectors, mainly wind. However there is no accurate published calculation of the proportion of the ca 352 000 species of angiosperms that interact with pollinators. Widely cited figures range from 67% to 96% but these have not been based on firm data. We estimated the number and proportion of flowering plants that are pollinated by animals using published and unpublished community‐level surveys of plant pollination systems that recorded whether each species present was pollinated by animals or wind. The proportion of animal‐pollinated species rises from a mean of 78% in…