Format: ORAL

Alexandre K. Monro1,Pablo Hendrigo Alves de Melo2, Manuel Lujan1,Nadia Bystriakova3

1. Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, Richmond, London, UK 2. Instituto Federal de Educação, Ciência e Tecnologia de Minas Gerais, Campus Avançado Piumhi, Minas Gerais, Brazil 3. The Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road, London, UK

For the most part, botanical inventories in the Neotropics have occurred in a haphazard, uncoordinated manner and lacked explicit sampling strategies. We assemble a cleaned version of GBIF biological collections data for the Neotropics to evaluate the gaps and biases in sampling effort to date with respect to predicted diversity, evolutionary distinctness, extinction threat, habitat type and ecosystem services. Whilst not complete, GBIF represents the single most important source of occurrence data for the Neotropics, comprising ca 8 million occurrence records (tracheophyte preserved specimens with coordinates). Preserved specimens the data class corresponding to herbarium collections, comprises occurrence records backed by a physical specimen whose identity can be verified. We downloaded and parsed all occurrence records into unique collection events1, matched these to a unified taxonomic backbone (World Checklist of Vascular Plant Names2) and then projected them onto a map of the Neotropics divided into grid cells of 10 x 10 km. We then overlayed onto this map of observed tracheophyte species richness, IUCN habitat classes3, estimates of predicted species richness, the evolutionary lineage coverage, frequency of threatened species and the estimates of carbon and water value4. This enabled us to identify bias in the sample effort of previous botanical inventories in respect of all the above, and to identify the major gaps in occurrence data for the region. 1. Hendrigo Alves de Melo et al. (2023). https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-3579370/v1 2. Govaerts et al. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-021-00997-6 3. Keith et al. (2020) https://doi.org/10.2305/IUCN.CH.2020.13.en 4. Jung et al. (2021) https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01528-7