Biodiversity Data Journal : Taxonomic paper
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Corresponding author: Emma Victoria Williams (e.williams@kew.org), John Elia Ntandu (johnelia1998@gmail.com)
Academic editor: Luis Cayuela
Received: 26 Feb 2016 | Accepted: 30 Mar 2016 | Published: 15 Apr 2016
© 2016 Emma Victoria Williams, John Elia Ntandu, Paweł Ficinski, Maria Vorontsova.
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation: Williams E, Elia Ntandu J, Ficinski P, Vorontsova M (2016) Checklist of Serengeti Ecosystem Grasses. Biodiversity Data Journal 4: e8286. doi: 10.3897/BDJ.4.e8286
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We present the first taxonomic checklist of the Poaceae species of the Serengeti, Tanzania. A review of the literature and herbarium specimens recorded 200 species of grasses, in line with similar studies in other parts of East Africa. The checklist is supported by a total of 939 herbarium collections. Full georeferenced collection data is made available alongside a summary checklist in pdf format. More than a quarter of the species are known from a single collection highlighting the need for further research, especially concerning the rare species and their distribution.
Tanzania, Poaceae, Ngorongoro
The Serengeti Ecosystem Region (abbreviated as SER) is an area of 25,000 km2, found south of the Tanzania and Kenya border between 2° and 4° S, defined by the movement of migratory wildebeest (
Vegetation
The SER is part of White's Somalia-Masia vegetation type (
The Ngorongoro Conservation Area is dominated by a volcano formed 5-7 million years ago with a large central caldera formed 1-2 million years ago (
Species
The grass flora of Tanzania is documented through the Flora of Tropical East Africa (
To compile the checklist specimen data were gathered from literature and herbaria sources. Specimens from the Tanzania Serengeti Ecosystem region were databased at K, NHT and at the Serengeti Wildlife Research Centre’s herbaria in 2013 and 2014. Specimens from AAU, MO and US were downloaded from GBIF on 20th May 2014 (
All specimens where possible were georeferenced using the FTEA gazetteer (
Data was uploaded from BRAHMS following the Darwin Core Formats. The specimen barcode was set as the catalogue number when possible or if a barcode was not available a unique code from the BRAHMS Serengeti database was used. Each herbarium specimen duplicate is listed separately in the checklist. If the record was a literature citation only the institution code was set as "?" as it was unknown at which herbaria the specimen is located. Only commonly used synonyms were compiled and cited in the nomenclature section, full synonymy is available at the World Checklist of Selected Plant Families (
Asia & Pacific, not previously recorded for East Africa