Database of amphibian occurrence in the Amazon

Description

Primary biodiversity data are essential for understanding spatial and temporal patterns of biodiversity. Here we provide an extensive database obtained from four distinct sources: online platforms, peer-reviewed publications, non-peer-reviewed academic publications (grey literature) and personal collections deposited in specialized scientific collections. Thus, the database consists of 213,072 georeferenced occurrence records for 951 amphibian species distributed in 24,319 sampling points in the Amazon. This robust database contributed to the understanding of amphibian sampling distribution patterns in the Amazon, highlighting sampling gaps and biases in large-scale amphibian sampling patterns, supporting conservation actions and will be freely accessible for future spatial and temporal analyses that bring understanding of ecological patterns and functions of this important taxonomic group that are amphibians.

Steps to reproduce

Our amphibian occurrence database was created from four primary sources: I) "digitally accessible data platforms" (Global Biodiversity Facility - GBIF, Brazilian Biodiversity Information System - SiBBr, Biodiversity Authorization and Information System - SISBIO, SpeciesLink Network and VertNet Search Portal), collected between June 2020 to November 2023; II) "peer-reviewed articles", consisting of 150 articles published in scientific journals containing information on amphibian occurrences in the Amazon; III) "grey literature", including technical reports of Environmental Impact Studies/Environmental Impact Reports, as well as records of rescue and monitoring of amphibians in Hydroelectric Power Plants (UHEs) in the Amazon; and IV) "own data", which include the authors' personal collections covering 15 years of data collection, from 2007 to 2022, in the southern Brazilian Amazon. After obtaining the data, they were unified in a spreadsheet in DarwinCore format containing 41 columns (See the description of the columns in the README). The database underwent a filtering process that consisted of four phases. In the first phase, we excluded records that did not have geographic coordinates in their source database or with precision described in the database greater than 20 km. In the second phase, we excluded records identified above the species level, such as those at the genus (sp), group (gr), affinity (aff) or cf (cf) levels. In the third phase, the occurrences were clipped to the limits of the Amazon biome according to the limits proposed by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF, 2019). Subsequently, the remaining species occurrences were taxonomically updated by merging synonyms into the most recent valid species names (according to Frost, 2024). Each species then underwent a distribution assessment using three specialized platforms: AmphibiaWeb (2024), Frost (2024) and IUCN (2024), eliminating species that had diverged too far from the original distribution or range expansion published in peer-reviewed articles. At this stage, we also assessed the distribution of the species in biomes and their global extinction threat status, following the IUCN (2023) assessment. The bibliographic references used in this database are described in the README document

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