VegAndes: the vegetation database for the Latin American highlands (original) (raw)
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VegPáramo, a flora and vegetation database for the Andean páramo
The páramo region in the northern Andes is very biodiverse, presents high endemism and provides many ecosystem services. Unfortunately, the páramo is critically threatened by anthropogenic activities and climate change. Further research and development of efficient conservation strategies are therefore needed for the region, but they are often limited by the lack of consistent biological data-sources. Here we present Veg- Páramo (GIVD ID: SA-00-002, http://www.givd.info/ID/SA-00-002), a flora and vegetation database for the páramo based on phytosociological vegetation plots. VegPáramo contains data from 3,000 georeferenced vegetation plots with updated nomenclature. The database is accessible through the webportal http://www. vegparamo.com, from which floristic and vegetation data can be freely consulted and downloaded. This new tool should make future botanical and ecological páramo studies easier. VegPáramo is already geographically and floristically representative for the páramo region, but we hope it will continue to grow in scientific significance via new data addition and revision.
Vegetation databases for the 21st century - Special Volume, 2012
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The continental and marine territories of Uruguay are characterised by a rich convergence of multiple biogeographic ecoregions of the Neotropics, making this country a peculiar biodiversity spot. However, despite the biological significance of Uruguay for the South American subcontinent, the distribution of biodiversity patterns in this country remain poorly understood, given the severe gaps in available records of geographic species distributions. Currently, national biodiversity datasets are not openly available and, thus, a dominant proportion of the primary biodiversity data produced by researchers and institutions across Uruguay remains highly dispersed and difficult to access for the wider scientific and environmental community. In this paper, we aim to fill this gap by developing the first comprehensive, open-access database of biodiversity records for Uruguay (Biodiversidata), which is the result of a large-scale collaboration involving experts working across the entire rang...
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PLOS ONE, 2021
The aim of our study was to assess the importance of different Colombian bioregions in terms of the supply of useful plant species and the quality of the available distribution data. We assembled a dataset of georeferenced collection localities of all vascular plants of Colombia available from global and local online databases. We then assembled a list of species, subspecies and varieties of Colombia’s useful plants and retrieved all point locality information associated with these taxa. We overlaid both datasets with a map of Colombia’s bioregions to retrieve all species and useful species distribution records in each bioregion. To assess the reliability of our estimates of species numbers, we identified information gaps, in geographic and environmental space, by estimating their completeness and coverage. Our results confirmed that Colombia’s third largest bioregion, the Andean moist forest followed by the Amazon, Pacific, Llanos and Caribbean moist forests contained the largest n...
Biodiversity Data Journal
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 ...