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Abstract Zoos and natural history museums are both collections-based institutions with important missions in biodiversity research and education. Animals in zoos are a repository and living record of the world's biodiversity, whereas natural history museums are a permanent historical record of snapshots of biodiversity in time. Surprisingly, despite significant overlap in institutional missions, formal partnerships between these institution types are infrequent. Life history information, pedigrees, and medical records maintained at zoos should be seen as complementary to historical records of morphology, genetics, and distribution kept at museums. Through examining both institution types, we synthesize the benefits and challenges of cross-institutional exchanges and propose actions to increase the dialog between zoos and museums. With a growing recognition of the importance of collections to the advancement of scientific research and discovery, a transformational impact could be made with long-term investments in connecting the institutions that are caretakers of living and preserved animals. 

A key feature of life’s diversity is that some species are common but many more are rare. Nonetheless, at global scales, we do not know what fraction of biodiversity consists of rare species. Here, we present the largest compilation of global plant diversity to quantify the fraction of Earth’s plant biodiversity that are rare. A large fraction, ~36.5% of Earth’s ~435,000 plant species, are exceedingly rare. Sampling biases and prominent models, such as neutral theory and the k-niche model, cannot account for the observed prevalence of rarity. Our results indicate that (i) climatically more stable regions have harbored rare species and hence a large fraction of Earth’s plant species via reduced extinction risk but that (ii) climate change and human land use are now disproportionately impacting rare species. Estimates of global species abundance distributions have important implications for risk assessments and conservation planning in this era of rapid global change.