Dataset of herbarium specimens of threatened vascular plants in Catalonia

Study Extent

Catalonia is an administrative region in the northeastern corner of Spain in the Mediterranean Coast that covers approximately 32,000 km² (Figure 1). It includes a large biogeographic, physiographic and orographic diversity due to the presence of the Pyrenees in the north and the Mediterranean Sea in the east. The most abundant climate is Mediterranean, characterized by warm winters and hot and drought summers. The annual average temperature ranges between 1ºC above 2,000 m in the Pyrenees and 18ºC below 50 m. Annual precipitation ranges from 200 mm in the Catalan Central Depression to more than 1,250 mm in some areas of the Pyrenees.
The vascular flora of Catalonia includes 4,831 taxa (Font 2016) that constitute a relevant part of the Western Mediterranean flora. There are plants from three principal biogeographic regions (Bolòs & Vigo 1984): (a) the Mediterranean flora, characterized by sclerophyllous forests and shrubs, (b) the Euro-Siberian (including Atlantic and Sub-Mediterranean) elements that reach the rainy mountains and are characterized by deciduous forests and mesic grasslands, and (c) the Boreo-Alpine elements of the mountains highlands, with subalpine forests and alpine grasslands.

Sampling

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Method steps

1. The creation of this dataset has included different processes: (1) specimens searching, (2) specimens digitalization, (3) dataset documentation, (4) dataset unification and analysis and (5) dataset publication at the GBIF portal. The first three steps have been done by the responsibility of the curator of each herbarium.
   1. The search of all the specimens of the Catalonian threatened taxa has been done exhaustively thanks to a list of synonyms prepared in Nualart et al. (2012) since specimens may be stored in the herbaria under different synonymous names.
   2. The digitalization of the specimens has been done by different programs that allow the inclusion in the database of all the information in the label. In BC herbarium this step is managed with Herbar (Pando et al. 1994-2010), in BCN with an own application developed in Access, in HGI with an own program developed in File Maker Pro 2.0 by Macintosh (Campos et al. 1995) and in MTTE with MuseumPlus by ZetCom (the program used by all the Museums in Catalonia).
   3. The dataset documentation includes all the revisions that have been taken place to improve the information of each specimen, such as check the locality of collecting thanks to information from the botanists’ documentation and the database. Also the names of the collectors have been checked—when they were not clear—according to the calligraphy in the label. Moreover, all the localities have been geo-referenced wherever possible using coordinates UTM 10 Km2 (MGRS system) from Catalonia geographical viewer (http://www.icc.cat/vissir3). Those specimens with more precise coordinates in the label, the coordinates have been generalized to blur sensitive information due to the threatened degree of these taxa. Furthermore, the locality information has been completed indicating wherever possible, the province and the municipality according to ICC (2009). Finally, the indication of the country and province has been standardized following the ISO 3166.
   4. For the dataset unification a list of fields has been decided considering the maximum possible number of common fields in the different herbaria databases. This list includes the following information: (1) the catalog number, (2) the taxon name, (3) the information about the identification (date and researcher), (4) the locality information (country, province, municipality, locality name, UTM coordinates and altitude in meters), (5) the ecology and (6) the gathering information (date, collector, collector number and exsiccate or field campaign). Each curator has prepared its dataset in an Excel table and finally all the records of each herbarium have been unified in a single dataset. The analysis for describe the dataset (tables and graphics presented in this paper) have been carried out in Excel from this unique dataset. The distribution maps have been created using ArcGis 10.2.
   5. For the publication in the GBIF portal all the data have been accommodated to fulfil the Darwin Core Standard (Wieczorek et al. 2012). The Darwin Test (Ortega-Maqueda & Pando 2008) has been used to convert coordinates from UTM to decimal degrees which are used in the Darwin Core format. The Integrated Publishing Toolkit (IPT v2.0.5) of the GBIF.es (http://www.gbif.es:8080/ipt) has been used to upload the Darwin Core Archive and to fill out the metadata.
   

In this project, we have compiled the records of the threatened taxa specimens included in the Catalonia Red List (Sáez et al. 2010: 772). This Red list include species and subspecies which are in a higher or lower risk of extinction, and those that have become extinct nowadays. It includes 199 threatened taxa according to the IUCN categories (IUCN 2012). The 45.72% are vulnerable (VU), with a high risk of endangerment, the 27.13% are endangered (EN), with a high risk of extinction and the 18.59% are critically endangered (CR), with an extremely high risk of extinction. The rest are extinct, either regionally or globally; the 8.04% are locally extinct in this region (RE)—although one (Marsilea quadrifolia) is only extinct in the wild thanks to a cultivated population in the area (RE (EW))—and finally there is an endemic taxon considered totally extinct (EX), Festuca paucispicula.

1. Plantae
   rank: kingdom

The present dataset covers all the area of Catalonia (Spain)