Notes on the geographic distribution of the Useful Plants of Colombia (dataset of georeferenced plant records)

This dataset contains the georeferenced plant records used for the chapter "Notes on the geographic distribution of the Useful Plants of Colombia", in the Catalogue of Useful Plants of Colombia (Negrão, Monroe, Castellanos & Diazgranados (Eds.) 2022). Georeferenced occurrence records were downloaded from GBIF on 15 July 2021 (GBIF Occurrence Download, 2021), using the R package rgbif v3.5.2 (Chamberlain and Boettiger, 2017) in R v.4.1.1 (R Core Team, 2020). We cleaned these data with the shinyCCleaner tool by removing records: with coordinates outside Colombia; duplicates; assigned to country’s centroids or institutions; non-terrestrial; rounded to less than one decimal place; with equal or zero longitudes and latitudes; and within 1 km of the capital. Because of the importance of using some naturalised and cultivated species, which have been already incorporated into the cultural practices by communities, we carried out all the analyses on all useful plants regardless of their origin. The cleaned database of georeferenced records (occurrences) included 435,230 occurrences, belonging to 6,320 (85%) species, 1,936 (91%) genera, and 248 (96%) families. The list used for the analyses included 6,897 (92%) species with confirmed presence in at least one Colombian department, and 6,581 (89%) species showed elevation range information. The majority of useful plants of Colombia are native (at least 5,881 species, 78.6%), including 481 endemic species to Colombia (8.2% of the native species). There are at least 643 naturalised species and 1,077 cultivated species reported.