Abstract
The remarkable biodiversity of the Brazilian Amazon is poorly documented and threatened by deforestation. When undocumented areas become deforested, in addition to losing the fauna and flora, we lose the opportunity to know which unique species had occupied a habitat. Here we quantify such knowledge loss by calculating how much of the Brazilian Amazon has been deforested and will likely be deforested until 2050 without having its tree flora sufficiently documented. To this end, we analysed 399 147 digital specimens of nearly 6000 tree species in relation to official deforestation statistics and future deforestation scenarios. We find that by 2017, 30% of all the localities where tree specimens had been collected were mostly deforested. Some 300 000 km2 (12%; 485 25 × 25 km grid cells) of the Brazilian Amazon had been deforested by 2017, without having a single tree specimen recorded. An additional 250 000–900 000 km2 of severely under‐collected rainforest will likely become deforested by 2050. If future tree sampling is to cover this area, sampling effort has to increase two‐ to six‐fold. Nearly 255 000 km2 or 7% of rainforest in the Brazilian Amazon is easily accessible but does yet but remain under‐collected. Our study highlights how progressing deforestation increases the risk of losing undocumented species of a hyper‐diverse tree flora.
Highlights
The Amazon basin harbours one of the most diverse terrestrial floras and faunas on Earth (Gentry 1992)
We focus on the Brazilian Amazon, a region that covers approximately 60% of the Amazon rainforest and for which detailed deforestation statistics have been published since 1988 (Kintisch 2007, INPE 2019)
We explored how deforestation and collection effort varied across the Brazilian Amazon by computing descriptive statistics for land-cover classes and the number of specimens and species in each 25 × 25-km grid cell
Summary
The Amazon basin harbours one of the most diverse terrestrial floras and faunas on Earth (Gentry 1992). Habitat loss and deforestation continue to threaten forests throughout the basin (Fearnside 2015). Of stability, deforestation – the clear cut of mature forest – is increasing again, with an estimated 9.762 km being clear-cut only in the Brazilian Amazon between August 2018 and July 2019 (Barlow et al 2019, INPE 2019). Widespread deforestation will likely lead to massive species extinctions. It remains unknown, how many and which species will be most affected (Grelle 2005, Hubbell et al 2008, Crooks et al 2017). The inventory of Amazonian trees (currently ranging from ~7000 to ~10 000 species (Cardoso et al 2017, ter Steege et al 2019)) is far from complete and as many as 5000 new tree species may still be undiscovered (ter Steege et al 2016)
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