In this talk, the researcher from the Federal University of Bahia will address advances in knowledge of plants from the vast Amazon forests.
The Amazon is home to the largest tropical rainforest biome in the world and performs essential ecosystem services, such as regulating the global climate.
If, on the one hand, much is already known about large-scale ecological and biogeochemical processes in the Amazon, little is known about plant biodiversity, the main actors in the evolutionary theatre of this majestic forest. For example, how many different species of trees are there throughout the Amazon? What about the number of individuals? Can we count the trees in the Amazon in billions, just as we count the number of stars in a night on the banks of the Douro River? Filling the gap in taxonomic knowledge, that is, about the identity of plant species, has been a challenge in the Amazon.
In this talk, the researcher from the Federal University of Bahia will address advances in knowledge of plants from the vast Amazon forests based on field expeditions, herbarium collections, collaborative networks for the production of taxonomically verified checklists and molecular phylogeny of rare and evolutionarily enigmatic species.
The event is organized by the UNESCO Chair on Biodiversity Safeguard for Sustainable Development and the Centre for Functional Ecology at the University of Coimbra.