Abstract
BackgroundBrazil 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.New informationThe "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.
Highlights
Brazil is one of the countries with the highest number of plant species in the world (Forzza et al 2012)
The "Parque Nacional do Itatiaia" houses 13% of the angiosperm and 37% of the fern species known from the Brazilian Atlantic Forest
The first step of this protocol was to manually select all records determined at the species level, which led to the following results: angiosperms, gymnosperms and lycophytes and ferns
Summary
Brazil is one of the countries with the highest number of plant species in the world (Forzza et al 2012). Brazil hosts about 37,000 species of land plants distributed through six phytogeographical domains (Flora do Brasil 2020 under construction 2019): Atlantic Forest, Amazon, Cerrado, Caatinga, Pampa and Pantanal. There are 488 federal protected areas within the Atlantic Forest domain, corresponding to 20% of the existing conservation units in Brazil (MMA 2020). These protected areas are responsible for the defence and management of large reservoirs of biodiversity, carbon stocks and water, with substantial social and economic impact for the country (Hassler 2005, Medeiros et al 2011). 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. Considering the whole vascular flora, 2,238 species are native and 78 are non-native
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