Aquatic vascular plants of South Brazil: checklist and a comparative floristic approach

Abstract

Aquatic ecosystems support species diversity, and knowledge of plant communities is essential for wetland conservation programs. This study provides a checklist of aquatic vascular plants of South Brazil and establishes their floristic affinities with bordering South America phytogeographical domains. The checklist was based on 52 sources, including 35 floristic lists, 17 regional taxonomic studies, and information from an electronic database on wetlands of South Brazil. Floristic similarities with published checklists for neighbouring regions were assessed. A total of 780 species distributed in 277 genera and 85 families of vascular plants were reported for South Brazil. Families with higher species richness were Cyperaceae (128), Poaceae (102), Asteraceae (69), Plantaginaceae (21), Lentibulariaceae (20), and Onagraceae (20). The most represented genera were Eleocharis (41) and Cyperus (24). A cluster analysis revealed high similarity with Iberá (Argentinian Chaco), Pampa and Atlantic Forest, and low similarity with Pantanal, Caatinga and the Amazon Rainforest. The high number of aquatic plant families recorded relative to temperate and tropical climates suggests a zone of biogeographical overlap in Southern Brazil. The compiled data set reveals high biodiversity of wetlands of South Brazil, provides a baseline for future research, and highlights the need for regional conservation planning.

Limnological layers improve species distribution modeling of aquatic macrophytes at fine-spatial resolution

“…Studies indicated that the set of environmental variables, which better explains the distribution of aquatic macrophyte species, depends on the level of spatial resolution and the geographical scale of the data and scope of the investigation (Barendregt & Bio 2003;Capers et al 2010;Moura-Júnior et al 2015;Pulzatto et al 2019). Study areas with extensive latitudinal and/or longitudinal gradients present heterogeneous bioclimatic systems, which significantly influence the geographical distribution of aquatic macrophyte species (Oliveira et al 2019;Murphy et al 2019). This explains the satisfactory performance of SDM studies of aquatic macrophytes using layers of bioclimatic variables and whose models were applied to a very extensive background (Lehtonen 2009;Mukherjee et al 2011;Lopes et al 2017;Rodriguez-Merino et al 2018;Nascimento et al 2020), unlike the present study.…”

Aquatic Macrophytes in Southern Amazonia, Brazil: Richness, Endemism, and Comparative Floristics

“…Nevertheless, this highest number of species records for northern Brazil (515 species) may be related to the larger extent and higher diversity of the areas sampled and the periods when the surveys were taken (Moura-Júnior et al 2015). For northeastern and southern Brazil, long-term studies with sampling in widely distributed areas have reported high species richness (637 and 760 species, respectively) (Moura-Júnior and Cotarelli 2019; Oliveira et al 2019). Most surveys in the Amazon region were done before 2016.…”

“…The richness of herbaceous aquatic macrophytes was determinant for the similarity between the study sites, particularly regarding families such as Poaceae and Cyperaceae. These families are the richest in wetlands worldwide (Murphy et al 2019) (Oliveira et al 2019), where it is among the ve richest families. Also notable is the relative importance of Onagraceae, which in most studies is not among the richest families despite its wide distribution in Brazil ).…”

Advances in the knowledge of the natural history of aquatic plants in the Neotropics

“…Studies with this approach can be applied to interpret a species' biogeographical or ecological niche on a local or regional scale and conservation of this group of plants on macroscales (O'Hare et al 2018). Species richness and distribution patterns or the selection of environmental predictors for the occurrence of aquatic plants in different spatial scales are approaches that have recently caught the interest of ecologists (Moreira et al 2015;Lopes et al 2016;Moura-Júnior & Cotarelli 2019;Oliveira et al 2019;Pulzato et al 2019;Murphy et al 2020;Moura-Júnior et al 2021a). Three manuscripts published in this ABB issue report investigations on some of these approaches.…”

“…The virtual platform was launched in 2018 (https://sites.icb.ufmg.br/plantasaquaticasbrasil/), together with the publication of the data from Southeastern Brazil (Pivari et al 2019). The first census of aquatic plants of Northeastern (Moura-Júnior et al 2013), Northern (Moura-Júnior et al 2015, and Southern Brazil (Oliveira et al 2019), as well as the updated list for the Northeastern region (Moura-Júnior & Cotarelli 2019), are amongst the publications associated with the data repository project.…”