Abstract
AbstractMotivationWe accessed published and unpublished floristic sources to compile a comprehensive species list of the Iberian–Balearic terrestrial vascular flora and generate AFLIBER, an accurate floristic database of georeferenced plant occurrence records.Main type of variable containedSpecies distribution data totalling 1,824,549 plant occurrence records corresponding to 6,456 species and subspecies.Spatial location and grainThe western Mediterranean, including inland territories of Spain, Portugal and Andorra and the adjacent archipelagos of Berlengas, Columbretes and the Balearic Islands, covered by 6,316 UTM quadrangular grid cells of 10 km resolution.Time periodAll distributional trustable records were considered to create the AFLIBER database, most of them dating from the 1960s onwards.Major taxa and level of measurementTerrestrial vascular plant species and subspecies.Software formatData are supplied as comma‐separated text (csv) files.
Highlights
With nearly 6,500 native vascular plant species and subspecies, of which 28% are endemics (Buira et al, 2017), the Iberian Peninsula and its eastern Baetic offshore prolongation comprise about one-quarter of the total vascular taxa of the Mediterranean basin (c. 25,000 species), the world's third-richest plant biodiversity hotspot (Fady & Concord, 2010; Myers et al, 2000)
In order to tease apart doubtful and/or potentially erroneous information conservatively, we filtered Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) records to include only those georeferenced within the limits of the administrative provinces of Spain, Portugal and Andorra where the species occur according to Flora iberica (FI) and other later reliable publications
The outstanding plant diversity and geographical extension of the Iberian Peninsula within the Mediterranean basin hotspot makes it an ideal setting to advance our understanding of the Mediterranean flora (Nieto Feliner, 2014), which has been greatly hampered by the lack of a comprehensive source of regional plant distribution
Summary
With nearly 6,500 native vascular plant species and subspecies, of which 28% are endemics (Buira et al, 2017), the Iberian Peninsula (western Mediterranean) and its eastern Baetic offshore prolongation (the Balearic archipelago; Sàbat et al, 2011) comprise about one-quarter of the total vascular taxa of the Mediterranean basin (c. 25,000 species), the world's third-richest plant biodiversity hotspot (Fady & Concord, 2010; Myers et al, 2000). The outstanding characteristics of this database are threefold: (1) it has been generated according to the latest knowledge in floristics and taxonomy published for the region; (2) it has reduced geographical biases by incorporating both subregional databases broadly absent from previous wide-ranging repositories and distributional information published in monographs, grey literature and floristic articles; and (3) it provides occurrence records that were filtered conservatively to minimize identification and georeferencing errors (see Methods) by means of a combined automatic and manual protocol undertaken by professional botanists specialized in the Iberian flora This dataset represents an unprecedented effort to support botanical, biogeographical and macroecological studies in the western Mediterranean by providing comprehensive and carefully curated plant distributional information across the Iberian Peninsula
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