If you go walking in the wild, you might expect that what you’re seeing is natural. All around you are trees, shrubs and grasses growing in their natural habitat.

But there’s something here that doesn’t add up. Across the world, there are large areas of habitat which would suit native plant species just fine. But very often, they’re simply absent.

Our new research gauges the scale of this problem, known as “dark diversity”. Our international team of 200 scientists examined plant species in thousands of sites worldwide.