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Plant species richness record in Brazilian Pampa grasslands and implications

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Abstract

Species richness remains one of the most valuable type of information for biodiversity conservation. Here, we report a plant richness record in the Brazilian Pampa. We found 56 vascular plant species in a single plot of 1 × 1 m in a privately owned grazed grassland in a region with shallow soils. This number is considerably higher than common species numbers in similar surveys and highlights the high plant diversity in South Brazilian grasslands. We take our record as an opportunity to reflect on some issues of high importance if we wish to reach conservation goals: much of the biodiversity is inside private lands, and these should be more in the focus of conservation efforts; field research, especially quantitative sampling, continues to be essential to improve knowledge on biodiversity and its distribution patterns; training biologists to be able to carry out biodiversity assessments and to interpret the results should be a key issue for universities. We hope that the communication of this record will encourage new scientific discoveries and raise social interest about the conservation of grasslands in South Brazil.

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Acknowledgements

Our work was supported by MCTIC and CNPq within the Research Program on Biodiversity (PPBio), network Campos Sulinos (Grant 457447/2012-5). We thank Eduardo Vélez for support and landowners for allowing the research. The two last authors received productivity grants from the National Council of Technological and Scientific Development (CNPq). We thank Valério De Patta Pillar for comments on the manuscript. LSM was supported by CAPES.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Programa de Pós-graduação em Botânica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, Porto Alegre, RS, CEP 91501-970, Brazil

    Luciana da Silva Menezes, Cleusa Vogel Ely, Dióber Borges Lucas, Graziela Har Minervini Silva, Ilsi Iob Boldrini & Gerhard Ernst Overbeck

  2. Departamento de Botânica, Programa de Pós-graduação em Botânica, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Av. Bento Gonçalves, 9500, Porto Alegre, RS, CEP 91501-970, Brazil

    Ilsi Iob Boldrini & Gerhard Ernst Overbeck

Authors
  1. Luciana da Silva Menezes
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  2. Cleusa Vogel Ely
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  3. Dióber Borges Lucas
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  4. Graziela Har Minervini Silva
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  5. Ilsi Iob Boldrini
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  6. Gerhard Ernst Overbeck
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Contributions

LSM, CVE, DBL, GHMS conducted fieldwork, GEO lead the research project, IOB identified plant species, and all authors wrote and reviewed the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luciana da Silva Menezes.

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da Silva Menezes, L., Vogel Ely, C., Lucas, D.B. et al. Plant species richness record in Brazilian Pampa grasslands and implications. Braz. J. Bot 41, 817–823 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40415-018-0492-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40415-018-0492-6

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