Liverworts (Marchantiophyta) form a conspicuous and important component in many terrestrial ecosystems throughout the world. Despite of their significance and abundance, studies of various aspects on global plant species richness and distribution patterns have almost exclusively focused on vascular plants. Yet, comprehensive studies of liverwort plant diversity have many implications and broad applications. We use a preliminary dataset that unites liverwort nomenclature, taxonomy, and geography based on some 60,000 records. Global maps are produced for the taxonomic ranks of species, genus, and family to provide a rapid guide of diversity across political units worldwide. The usefulness of higher level taxon analyses was investigated at the genus and family level to test the relationship with species richness. A reduced set of taxonomic ranks other than species has been proved to be useful for rapid and cost-effective assessment of biodiversity. We provide the first examination of how well this method performs for liverworts. Generic richness was slightly more accurately related to species richness than that of families, indicating surrogacy at this taxonomic level as a promising approach for the prediction of liverwort species richness. Finally, given the fact that vascular plant diversity and distribution patterns are often given high consideration in evaluating global networks of protected areas and biodiversity hotspots, we present a comparison of centers of species richness between liverworts and vascular plants. Several regions of high liverwort species richness lie outside the highest centers of vascular plant species richness. We conclude with ideas for future studies of the dataset, which has many exciting implications and applications for the study of liverwort distribution and diversity patterns.