Performance of an automated conservation status assessment for the megadiverse vascular flora of Brazil

Abstract

Conservation status assessments are one of the key scientific measures to inform solutions aiming at minimizing the biodiversity crisis of the Anthropocene, being the IUCN’s Red List approach the most widely used and accepted tool for species-level assessment. However, Red Lists are time-consuming because they necessarily rely on expert evaluation. Thus, the development of automated tools, able to handle the huge increasingly amount of data in less time, are useful for guiding conservation actions. In this sense, the aim of this research is to evaluate an automated preliminary conservation status assessment for all known endemic flora from the megadiverse Brazil. Vascular taxa were derived from the Brazilian Flora 2020 project and occurrences were retrieved from GBIF and SpeciesLink. Data was filtered and then evaluated with the aid of ConR package and high resolution nationwide vegetation maps. The current approach estimates that 28.78 % (22.72–43.75 %) of the endemic flora is threatened by extinction, with different patterns between the six Brazilian ecoregions: from 30.75 % (Amazonia’s lower) to 100 % (Pantanal’s best/upper). The high variation in the estimate is because more than a fifth of the vascular flora is poorly known (<3 records). Accuracy assessment reveals a good agreement between the reference from the Brazilian Flora 2020 project and a binary classification (threatened/not- or near-threatened), with an overall accuracy of 61.67 % (58.84–64.47 %), but with limited capacity to distinguish between the IUCN’s threat levels (Critically Endangered, Endangered and Vulnerable to extinction). Bromeliaceae and Orchidaceae are the families with higher estimated number, proportion in relation to the whole family and uncertainty of estimated threatened species, reflecting that herb is the life form with far more threatened species, followed by shrubs. The presented approach can serve as rapid assessment tool for optimizing efforts and to identify potentially threatened species and hotspots of species that could be considered for timely and effective conservation actions. As a practical recommendation, botanists could prioritize the assessment of the species indicated here as threatened, as there is a high chance of confirming this status, and efforts can be properly addressed for their conservation. Moreover, the automated approach can be useful for monitoring the progress of conservation targets. Finally, further scientific research is urgent to fill the knowledge gap on the Brazilian flora aiming at its conservation.