Available data and risk assessment of the Brazilian threatened species of Combretaceae

Abstract

The risk assessment is made up of risk analyses of species extinction in a given time, following the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) criteria. In Brazil, the data necessary for risk assessments have poor quality, so we proposed the articulation of previous processes to improve data quality. The main objective of this work was to reassess the extinction risk of Brazilian species of Combretaceae previously considered as threatened, updating conservation data available for these taxa. Our results showed that the processes of taxonomic proceedings; data gathering; data analysis; georeferencing and communication improved the assessments consistency, specially due to systematization of the whole process. Of the 11 selected species for reassessment, five were threatened in the categories VU, EN, CR e CR* and six under significant threat of extinction. However the deficiency of herbaria data, the lack of digitalization of the majority of country collections and the limited access to available literature represent the main obstacles for extinction risk assessments of the Brazilian flora.