An assessment of collection specimen data for South African mountain plants and invertebrates

Abstract

South Africa is considered a megadiverse country, with exceptionally high plant and relatively high animal species richness and endemism. The country’s species have been surveyed and studied for over 200 years, resulting in extensive natural science collections and a vast number of scientific papers and books. This study assessed whether existing data portals provide access to occurrence data and investigated the extent of the data in Global Biodiversity Information Facility and its completeness for plants and selected invertebrate taxa. The main focus was preserved specimen data, but some observation data from iNaturalist were also considered for selected analyses. Records that include species-level identification and co-ordinates were mapped in QGIS to show the coverage of collection localities across the country. The records that fall within the mountain range spatial layer were then extracted and counted to identify density of records per mountain range for various taxa. Forty percent of plant records are from mountain localities, and the Atlantic Cape Fold Mountains had the highest density of records. Table Mountain has been extensively collected for plants and invertebrates. A large proportion of the records for invertebrates lacked species-level identification and co-ordinates, resulting in a low number of records for analyses. The accessible data are only a relatively small subset of existing collections, and digitisation and data upgrading is considered a high priority before collecting gaps can be addressed by targeted surveys.

Keywords:

• museums
• herbaria
• GBIF
• maps
• surveys
• digitisation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The organisers of the Southern African Mountain Conference (2022) are thanked for the opportunity to participate in the conference. Institutions that have submitted data sets to GBIF are thanked for providing access to their data. The Natural Science Collections Facility is funded by the Department of Science & Innovation through the South African Research Infrastructure Roadmap (SARIR) programme. The authors thank the anonymous reviewer for comments and suggested improvements to the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

The Natural Science Collections Facility is funded by a grant from the South African Department of Science and Innovation [DSI/CON C2501/2021].