Knowledge on biodiversity is fundamental for conservation strategies. The Brazilian Pampa region, located in subtropical southern Brazil, is neglected in terms of conservation, and knowledge of its biodiversity is fragmented. We aim to answer the question: how many, and which, species occur in the Brazilian Pampa? In a collaborative effort, we built species lists for plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi that occur in the Brazilian Pampa. We included information on distribution patterns, main habitat types, and conservation status. Our study resulted in referenced lists totaling 12,503 species (12,854 taxa, when considering infraspecific taxonomic categories [or units]). Vascular plants amount to 3,642 species (including 165 Pteridophytes), while algae have 2,046 species (2,378 taxa) and bryophytes 316 species (318 taxa). Fungi (incl. lichenized fungi) contains 1,141 species (1,144 taxa). Animals total 5,358 species (5,372 taxa). Among the latter, vertebrates comprise 1,136 species, while invertebrates are represented by 4,222 species. Our data indicate that, according to current knowledge, the Pampa holds approximately 9% of the Brazilian biodiversity in an area of little more than 2% of Brazil's total land. The proportion of species restricted to the Brazilian Pampa is low (with few groups as exceptions), as it is part of a larger grassland ecoregion and in a transitional climatic setting. Our study yielded considerably higher species numbers than previously known for many species groups; for some, it provides the first published compilation. Further efforts are needed to increase knowledge in the Pampa and other regions of Brazil. Considering the strategic importance of biodiversity and its conservation, appropriate government policies are needed to fund studies on biodiversity, create accessible and constantly updated biodiversity databases, and consider biodiversity in school curricula and other outreach activities.

Male and female genitalia include some of the most complex and morphologically diverse structures in Metazoa. Ornamentations in genitalia have been studied in several groups, and a variety of functional roles have been proposed. Although complex features of the genitalia have been observed in internal genitalia in cicadas, their functions have not yet been elucidated. These ornamentations, together with precopulatory sexual selection, make cicadas good models for evolutionary studies on genital coupling. We explore the structural interaction of male and female genitalia in Guyalna bonaerensis (Berg) (Cicadinae) and the morphology of male ornamentations in Cicadinae generally. We group these ornamentations into two traits according to their inferred function: anchoring or gripping. We analyse the theca and vesica of 24 species and perform ancestral trait reconstruction under maximum likelihood and stochastic mapping on a Bayesian tree. Ornamentations of the male vesica and the female seminal ampoule possibly ensure male attachment by working as an active lock to avoid the premature termination of intercourse. These ornamentations emerged independently in different lineages in Cicadinae, reinforcing the suggestion that they are important adaptations to achieve complete copulation. Our results foster questions for the field of sexual selection and associated mechanisms shaping the evolution of male and female genitalia.

Plazi's TreatmentBank is a research infrastructure and partner of the recent European Union-funded Biodiversity Community Integrated Knowledge Library (BiCIKL) project to provide a single knowledge portal to open, interlinked and machine-readable, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) data. Plazi is liberating published biodiversity data that is trapped in so-called flat formats, such as portable document format (PDF), to increase its FAIRness. This can pose a variety of challenges for both data mining and curation of the extracted data. The automation of such a complex process requires internal organization and a well established workflow of specific steps (e.g., decoding of the PDF, extraction of data) to handle the challenges that the immense variety of graphic layouts existing in the biodiversity publishing landscape can impose. These challenges may vary according to the origin of the document: scanned documents that were not initially digital, need optical character recognition in order to be processed. Processing a document can either be an individual, one-time-only process, or a batch process, in which a template for a specific document type must be produced. Templates consist of a set of parameters that tell Plazi-dedicated software how to read and where to find key pieces of information for the extraction process, such as the related metadata. These parameters aim to improve the outcome of the data extraction process, and lead to more consistent results than manual extraction. In order to produce such templates, a set of tests and accompanying statistics are evaluated, and these same statistics are constantly checked against ongoing processing tasks in order to assess the template performance in a continuous manner. In addition to these steps that are intrinsically associated with the automated process, different granularity levels (e.g., low granularity level might consist of a treatment and its subsections versus a high granularity level that includes material citations down to named entities such as collection codes, collector, collecting date) were defined to accommodate specific needs for particular projects and user requirements. The higher the granularity level, the more thoroughly checked the resulting data is expected to be. Additionally, steps related to the quality control (qc), such as the “pre-qc”, “qc” and “extended qc” were designed and implemented to ensure data quality and enhanced data accuracy. Data on all these different stages of the processing workflow are constantly being collected and assessed in order to improve these very same stages, aiming for a more reliable and efficient operation. This is also associated with a current Data Architecture plan to move this data assessment to a cloud provider to promote real-time assessment and constant analyses of template performance and processing stages as a whole. In this talk, the steps of this entire process are explained in detail, highlighting how data are being used to improve these steps towards a more efficient, accurate, and less costly operation.

We provide a commented and referenced list on the type material deposited in the "Museu de Ciencias Naturais, Fundação Zoobotânica do Rio Grande do Sul", Porto Alegre, Brazil. Geographic coordinates are available on a digital repository for free access. High-resolution images of the specimens are available under request.

The Linnean, Wallacean, and Darwinian shortfalls are knowledge gaps about species taxonomy, distribution, and evolution, respectively. Fidicinini is a tribe of cicadas that suffers from these gaps. We assessed specimens of the tribe sharing similar male genital shape (uncus), but fitting the somatic morphology of either Dorisiana Metcalf, 1952 and Guyalna Boulard & Martinelli, 1996. We build a phylogenetic hypothesis by total evidence analysis and perform a character optimization of the uncus and timbal cover shapes, the last used as diagnostic for both genera. Dorisiana and Guyalna were recovered non-monophyletic. A new genus, Acanthoventrisgen. nov., and ten new species are proposed: A. charrua Ruschel sp. nov., A. claudiae Ruschel sp. nov., A. faustopsaltrius Ruschel sp. nov., A. iara Ruschel sp. nov., A. igneus Ruschel sp. nov., A. olivarius Ruschel sp. nov., A. phoenix Ruschel sp. nov., A. rubemi Ruschel sp. nov., A. tumidus Ruschel sp. nov., and A. viridinotatus Ruschel sp. nov.; and three new combinations A. densusus (Boulard & Martinelli, 2011) comb. nov., A. drewseni (Stål, 1854) comb. nov., and A. jauffreti (Boulard & Martinelli, 2001) comb. nov. We provide illustrated identification keys, occurrence maps, and discuss the distribution of the species in the new genus.