Knowledge behind conservation status decisions: Data basis for “Data Deficient” Brazilian plant species

Methods for evaluating risk of biodiversity loss are linked closely to decisions about species' conservation status, which in turn depend on data documenting species' distributions, population status, and natural history. In Brazil, the scientific community and government have differing points of view regarding which plant species have insufficient data to be accorded a formal threat category, with the official list of threatened flora published by the Brazilian Ministry of Environment listing many fewer species as Data Deficient than a broader list prepared by a large, knowledgeable group of taxonomists. This paper aims to evaluate, using diverse analyses, whether “Digital Accessible Knowledge” is genuinely lacking or insufficient for basic characterization of distributions for 934 angiosperm species classified as Data Deficient on Brazil's official list. Analyses were based on large-scale databases of information associated with herbarium specimens, as part of the speciesLink network. Evaluating these species in terms of completeness of geographic range knowledge accumulated through time, our results show that at least 40.9% of species listed as Data Deficient do not appear genuinely to be particularly lacking in data, but rather may be knowledge-deficient: data exist that can provide rich information about the species, but such data remain unanalyzed and dormant for conservation decision-making. Such approaches may be useful in identifying cases in which data are genuinely lacking regarding conservation status of species, as well as in moving species out of Data Deficient categories and into appropriate threat status classifications.