Using online databases to produce comprehensive accounts of the vascular plants from the Brazilian protected areas: The Parque Nacional do Itatiaia as a case study

Abstract

Brazil is one of the most biodiverse countries in the world, with about 37,000 species of land plants. Part of this biodiversity is within protected areas. The development of online databases in the last years greatly improved the available biodiversity data. However, the existing databases do not provide information about the protected areas in which individual plant species occur. The lack of such information is a crucial gap for conservation actions. This study aimed to show how the information captured from online databases, cleaned by a protocol and verified by taxonomists allowed us to obtain a comprehensive list of the vascular plant species from the "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia", the first national park founded in Brazil. All existing records in the online database JABOT (15,100 vouchers) were downloaded, resulting in 11,783 vouchers identified at the species level. Overall, we documented 2,316 species belonging to 176 families and 837 genera of vascular plants in the "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia". Considering the whole vascular flora, 2,238 species are native and 78 are non-native. The "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia" houses 13% of the angiosperm and 37% of the fern species known from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Amongst these species, 82 have been cited as threatened, following IUCN categories (CR, EN or VU), seven are data deficient (DD) and 15 have been classified as a conservation priority, because they are only known from a single specimen collected before 1969.

International collaboration between collections‐based institutes for halting biodiversity loss and unlocking the useful properties of plants and fungi

“…Conservation applications range from rediscovery of a rheophyte not seen for c. 170 years, which provided evidence to inform boundaries of an ecological corridor (Bove & Philbrick, 2014), to development of species checklists to inform management and monitoring in long‐established Protected Areas that lacked such resources for many decades (e.g., Forzza & Lanna, 2020; Moreira et al., 2020).…”

Rediscovery and expansion of the distribution of Phyllanthus itatiaiensis Brade (Phyllanthaceae) in southeastern Brazil

“…Area characterization. The INP, comprises the Itatiaia massif, in the Serra da Mantiqueira, and includes municipalities in the states of Rio de Janeiro (RJ) and Minas Gerais (MG) (Moreira et al 2020). The area has a mesothermal climate and a rugged and rocky landscape ranging from 700 to 2,787 m a.s.l.…”

Floristic survey of vascular plants of a poorly known area in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest (Flona do Rio Preto, Espírito Santo)

“…These efforts resulted in the publication of several taxonomic and floristic studies for selected plant families in subsequent years (e.g. Luber et al 2016 , Pena and Alves-Araújo 2017 , Silva et al 2017 , Chagas et al 2017 , Souza et al 2017 , Araújo et al 2018 , Torres-Leite et al 2018 , Moreira et al 2020a , Moreira et al 2020b ). Despite that, the State includes multiple knowledge gaps and botanical data remain scattered ( Garbin et al 2017 ).…”