Occurrences of cactaceae on the American continent
Description
Reliable biodiversity data are fundamental for assessing species distributions, detecting knowledge gaps, and informing conservation strategies. We present a comprehensive dataset containing 435,694 georeferenced occurrence records for 1,892 species of Cactaceae across the Americas. This large-scale compilation provides an overview of the spatial distribution of cactus species, revealing geographic and taxonomic biases in sampling efforts. The dataset offers a valuable resource for advancing ecological and biogeographic research and supports future analyses aimed at understanding the diversity, distribution, and conservation needs of this emblematic plant family. This database is an expansion of the database compiled by Amaral et al., 2022
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Steps to reproduce
Our database expands on the foundational dataset compiled by Amaral et al. (2022), incorporating additional occurrence records of Cactaceae species sourced from publicly available digital biodiversity platforms. We retrieved data from three main repositories: (i) GBIF (Global Biodiversity Information Facility), (ii) iNaturalist (iNat), and (iii) iDigBio (Integrated Digitized Biocollections), using the “spocc” package in R version 4.4.1 (Chamberlain, Ram & Hart, 2021; R Core Team, 2024), with data indexed up to October 9, 2023. Taxonomic validation was performed using the Caryophyllales.org checklist (Korotkova et al., 2021), allowing the removal of misidentified taxa and entries with spelling inconsistencies. Records with spatial inaccuracies or vague locality information were excluded using the CoordinateCleaner package (Zizka et al., 2019). The final dataset comprises 435,694 georeferenced occurrences representing 1,892 Cactaceae species.
Institutions
- Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso