Authors
Marc SM Sosef, Gilles Dauby, Anne Blach-Overgaard, Xander van Der Burgt, Luís Catarino, Theo Damen, Vincent Deblauwe, Steven Dessein, John Dransfield, Vincent Droissart, Maria Cristina Duarte, Henry Engledow, Geoffrey Fadeur, Rui Figueira, Roy E Gereau, Olivier J Hardy, David J Harris, Janneke de Heij, Steven Janssens, Yannick Klomberg, Alexandra C Ley, Barbara A Mackinder, Pierre Meerts, Jeike L van de Poel, Bonaventure Sonké, Tariq Stévart, Piet Stoffelen, Jens-Christian Svenning, Pierre Sepulchre, Rainer Zaiss, Jan J Wieringa, Thomas LP Couvreur
Publication date
2017/12
Journal
BMC biology
Volume
15
Pages
1-23
Publisher
BioMed Central
Description
Background
Understanding the patterns of biodiversity distribution and what influences them is a fundamental pre-requisite for effective conservation and sustainable utilisation of biodiversity. Such knowledge is increasingly urgent as biodiversity responds to the ongoing effects of global climate change. Nowhere is this more acute than in species-rich tropical Africa, where so little is known about plant diversity and its distribution. In this paper, we use RAINBIO – one of the largest mega-databases of tropical African vascular plant species distributions ever compiled – to address questions about plant and growth form diversity across tropical Africa.
Results
The filtered RAINBIO dataset contains 609,776 georeferenced records representing 22,577 species. Growth form data are recorded for 97% of all species. Records are well distributed, but heterogeneous …
Scholar articles
MSM Sosef, G Dauby, A Blach-Overgaard… - BMC biology, 2017