Hello Sir! I hope you are good!

So, you can use NDVI (Normalized Difference Vegetation Index) to estimate the diversity coverage in general in % using satellite images. But I don't think it's suitable to know species and genus or even families, I'm not an expert in this field, but you can ask someone who knows better about NDVI. Or you can use the traditional way by asking some botanists to help you.

Good luck!

there are several metrics you may calculate from species content. You may use packages vegan and diveRsity in R. It is possible even to estimate the absolute number of species and other diversity metrics such as Shannon index by bootstrapping your data.

I am trying to make sense out of your question, and it sounds like you want to know how much your list of names covers of the total amount of plant diversity. If that is the case, then what I would try to do is the following:

• I would pick a very large, existing, plant phylogeny. For example the recent Smith & Brown tree (

  Article Constructing a broadly inclusive seed plant phylogeny

  )
• I would then try to reconcile the names that I have with the ones in the tree. This would involve doing taxonomic name reconciliation, for which there are fairly good R packages (e.g. taxize)
• Then, having mapped my names onto that tree I would come up with a measure that describes how much of the total tree I've got covered. For example by computing the total sum of branch lengths of my sample on the total tree length.

Hope this helps!

Dear Rutger. A. Vos, thank you so much for your suggestions!