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The Araucaria Forests in southern Brazil are part of the Atlantic Rainforest, a key hotspot for global biodiversity. This habitat has experienced extensive losses of vegetation cover due to commercial logging and the intense use of wood resources for construction and furniture manufacturing. The absence of precise taxonomic tools for identifying Araucaria Forest tree species motivated us to test the ability of DNA barcoding to distinguish species exploited for wood resources and its suitability for use as an alternative testing technique for the inspection of illegal timber shipments. We tested three cpDNA regions (matK, trnH-psbA, and rbcL) and nrITS according to criteria determined by The Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL). The efficiency of each marker and selected marker combinations were evaluated for 30 commercially valuable woody species in multiple populations, with a special focus on Lauraceae species. Inter- and intraspecific distances, species discrimination rates, and ability to recover species-specific clusters were evaluated. Among the regions and different combinations, ITS was the most efficient for identifying species based on the ‘best close match’ test; similarly, the trnH-psbA + ITS combination also demonstrated satisfactory results. When combining trnH-psbA + ITS, Maximum Likelihood analysis demonstrated a more resolved topology for internal branches, with 91% of species-specific clusters. DNA barcoding was found to be a practical and rapid method for identifying major threatened woody angiosperms from Araucaria Forests such as Lauraceae species, presenting a high confidence for recognizing members of Ocotea. These molecular tools can assist in screening those botanical families that are most targeted by the timber industry in southern Brazil and detecting certain species protected by Brazilian legislation and could be a useful tool for monitoring wood exploitation.

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The shortage of reliable primary taxonomic data limits the description of biological taxa and the understanding of biodiversity patterns and processes, complicating biogeographical, ecological, and evolutionary studies. This deficit creates a significant taxonomic impediment to biodiversity research and conservation planning. The taxonomic impediment and the biodiversity crisis are widely recognized, highlighting the urgent need for reliable taxonomic data. Over the past decade, numerous countries worldwide have devoted considerable effort to Target 1 of the Global Strategy for Plant Conservation (GSPC), which called for the preparation of a working list of all known plant species by 2010 and an online world Flora by 2020. Brazil is a megadiverse country, home to more of the world's known plant species than any other country. Despite that, Flora Brasiliensis, concluded in 1906, was the last comprehensive treatment of the Brazilian flora. The lack of accurate estimates of the number of species of algae, fungi, and plants occurring in Brazil contributes to the prevailing taxonomic impediment and delays progress towards the GSPC targets. Over the past 12 years, a legion of taxonomists motivated to meet Target 1 of the GSPC, worked together to gather and integrate knowledge on the algal, plant, and fungal diversity of Brazil. Overall, a team of about 980 taxonomists joined efforts in a highly collaborative project that used cybertaxonomy to prepare an updated Flora of Brazil, showing the power of scientific collaboration to reach ambitious goals. This paper presents an overview of the Brazilian Flora 2020 and provides taxonomic and spatial updates on the algae, fungi, and plants found in one of the world's most biodiverse countries. We further identify collection gaps and summarize future goals that extend beyond 2020. Our results show that Brazil is home to 46,975 native species of algae, fungi, and plants, of which 19,669 are endemic to the country. The data compiled to date suggests that the Atlantic Rainforest might be the most diverse Brazilian domain for all plant groups except gymnosperms, which are most diverse in the Amazon. However, scientific knowledge of Brazilian diversity is still unequally distributed, with the Atlantic Rainforest and the Cerrado being the most intensively sampled and studied biomes in the country. In times of “scientific reductionism”, with botanical and mycological sciences suffering pervasive depreciation in recent decades, the first online Flora of Brazil 2020 significantly enhanced the quality and quantity of taxonomic data available for algae, fungi, and plants from Brazil. This project also made all the information freely available online, providing a firm foundation for future research and for the management, conservation, and sustainable use of the Brazilian funga and flora.

Among the members of subtribe Pleurothallidinae, Acianthera is one of the largest genera in Brazil with ca. 107 endemic species. A recent study of Acianthera, including a phylogeny based on nrITS and a systematic revision, proposed dividing the genus into nine sections. In this revision, the genus Pleurobotryum was reduced to Acianthera sect. Pleurobotryae. However, the true position of this section and its circumscription are debatable because the authors included only one species of the genus and did not include the type species (Pleurobotryum atropurpureum Barb. Rodr.) in the analysis. The objective of this work was to study the monophyly of the section and phylogenetic relationships among the species of A. sect. Pleurobotryae. The study included all of the species in this group and used the nuclear marker ITS (ITS1, 5.8S gene and ITS2) and an initial portion of the plastid marker matK for individual and combined maximum parsimony, Bayesian and maximum likelihood analyses. The results show that A. sect. Pleurobotryae is monophyletic with high bootstrap, decay index, and posterior probability support. Within the group, the results suggest, with moderate to strong support, the recognition of two sister clades: [(Acianthera hatschbachii (Schltr.) Chiron & van den Berg, Acianthera atropurpurea (Barb. Rodr.) Chiron & van den Berg), (Acianthera mantiquyrana (Barb. Rodr.) V. T. Rodrigues & F. Barros, Acianthera crepiniana (Cogn.) Chiron & van den Berg)]. The lack of resolution using only nrITS, the strong phylogenetic signal from the matK, and the combined analyses suggest that more studies are needed to verify the phylogenetic position and circumscription of some of the other sections in the genus. In addition, it is important that type species and morphological characters are incorporated into the definitions of the clades.

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The yam genus Dioscorea comprises circa 650 species of tropical vines with starch rich tubers, usefull as an energy source and often containing secondary metabolites. The Neotropical Region holds the highest diversity of species and morphology of yams. We generated a time-calibrated tree for Dioscorea using, for the first time, a dense sampling of Neotropical species (64 sp., 20% of all Neotropical sp. and 22 sections) to trace the biogeography of these plants in this region. Four origins of Dioscorea in the neotropics were estimated since the Eocene. The two most diverse lineages originated between the Eocene and Oligocene, respectively in the Southern Andes and eastern South America. Both lineages occupied the South American ‘Dry Diagonal’ after the Miocene, but New World II clade remained associated with forest habitats. Several exchanges between Dry Diagonal and adjacent forested biomes occurred, corroborating the interchange between these vegetation types. Dispersals to Central America occurred before the closure of the Panama Isthmus. We highlight two important events of long distance dispersal, the colonization of Central American before the closure of Isthmus of Panama and the dispersal of D. antaly lineage to Madagascar. In addition, our phylogenetic tree evidenced the unnatural nature of the classical infrageneric classification of Dioscorea. The taxonomic implications of our results are also discussed.