Lists of organisms by population
Wikimedia list article
This is a collection of lists of organisms by their population. While most of the numbers are estimates, they have been made by the experts in their fields. Wildlife population measurement is a science falling under the purview of population ecology and biogeography. Individuals are counted by census, as carried out for the piping plover; using the transect method, as done for the mountain plover; and beginning in 2012 by satellite, with the emperor penguin being the first subject counted in this manner.
Number of species
More than 99 percent of all species, amounting to over five billion species, that ever lived on Earth are estimated to be extinct. Estimates on the number of Earth's current species range from 10 million to 14 million, of which about 1.2 million have been documented and more than 86 percent have not yet been described. According to another study, the number of described species has been estimated at 1,899,587. 2000–2009 saw approximately 17,000 species described per year. The total number of undescribed organisms is unknown, but marine microbial species alone could number 20,000,000. For this reason, the number of quantified species will always lag behind the number of described species, and species contained in these lists tend to be on the K side of the r/K selection continuum.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6647143. The Library of Congress control number is sh85005222. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2012, 2000 and 2009.
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This entry incorporates text from “Lists of organisms by population” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.