RAINBIO: a mega-database of tropical African vascular plants distributions

Abstract

The tropical vegetation of Africa is characterized by high levels of species diversity but is undergoing important shifts in response to ongoing climate change and increasing anthropogenic pressures. Although our knowledge of plant species distribution patterns in the African tropics has been improving over the years, it remains limited. Here we present RAINBIO, a unique comprehensive mega-database of georeferenced records for vascular plants in continental tropical Africa. The geographic focus of the database is the region south of the Sahel and north of Southern Africa, and the majority of data originate from tropical forest regions. RAINBIO is a compilation of 13 datasets either publicly available or personal ones. Numerous in depth data quality checks, automatic and manual via several African flora experts, were undertaken for georeferencing, standardization of taxonomic names and identification and merging of duplicated records. The resulting RAINBIO data allows exploration and extraction of distribution data for 25,356 native tropical African vascular plant species, which represents ca. 89% of all known plant species in the area of interest. Habit information is also provided for 91% of these species.

Keywords: Herbarium specimens; biodiversity assessment; cultivated species; digitization; georeferencing; habit; native species; taxonomic backbone; tropical forests.

Figure 1.

Left map: record density in 2° × 2°cell including all georeferenced records that passed the quality checks. This map includes records that are identified or not to species level. Right map: main extent of RAINBIO geographical coverage from south of Sahel and north of Southern Africa (grey area); extent of tropical rain forest regions adapted from the land cover map published by Mayaux et al. (2004) (green area).

Figure 2.

Examples of the georeferencing verification process. a The georeferenced record falls within a neighbouring country (here GAB) of its documented country (here COG). The nearest distance between the occurrence and the border of the documented country is computed b The georeferenced record falls within a non-neighbouring country (here GNQ) of its documented country (here Republic of the Congo). This record is classified as ‘Error’ and is discarded c The georeferenced record lies beyond the coastline. The nearest distance between the occurrence and the coastline of the documented country is computed.

Figure 3.

Most represented families (sorted by number of records) for each of the three divisions of vascular plants represented in the RAINBIO database. A Magnoliophyta B Gymnosperms C Pteridophyta.