Flora of Iceland

It is not known exactly how many plants in the widest sense, are involved in the Flora og Iceland. A team of Icelandic scientists, especially at the Icelandic Institute of Natural History, are investigating the different groups of plants, and they find every year several species not known from Iceland before, especially fungi, lichens and bryophytes. The phanerogam flora, flowering plants and ferns, are far better known. Only exceptionally, or once every 10 years are new wild species of vascular plants discovered in Iceland. One of the last one was Andromeda polifolia, which grows in a few remote places in the Northeastern part of the island.

As far as known today, there are more than 5.000 species of plants and fungi growing wild in Iceland. The enclosed table on the right side shows how these wild species are divided into different groups of plants.

These figures are in the case of the last three groups, very inaccurate. Many classes of fungi are badly known, since the very few Icelandic mycologists have not been able to cover them all. In these cases we have only data from foreign specialists that have visited the country for relatively short time, collected some material and published their findings. Similar is the situation with most groups of the algae. The benthic flora of the seashore is relatively well known, but the fresh water algae and the terrestrial algae are very incompletely known. Iceland has never had any specialists in those fields. All recorded species of terrestrial and freshwater algae are included in the enclosed table, as well as the benthic seashore algae, but the species of the oceanic plankton are not included.

The number of plants recorded from Iceland is relatively low compared with many other countries with comparable climate. The main reasons for this is the relatively isolated geographic position of the country, and rather short period of time since the country was more or less covered by ice during the last glaciation. Very large portion of the Icelandic flora must have been exterminated during the glaciations, and many have not been able to colonize again because of the great distance surrounded by the Atlantic ocean.