The Tropical Andes Biodiversity Hotspot: A Comprehensive Dataset for the Mira-Mataje Binational Basins

We present a flora and fauna dataset for the Mira-Mataje binational basins. This is an area shared between southwestern Colombia and northwestern Ecuador, where both the Chocó and Tropical Andes biodiversity hotspots converge. Information from 120 sources was systematized in the Darwin Core Archive (DwC-A) standard and geospatial vector data format for geographic information systems (GIS) (shapefiles). Sources included natural history museums, published literature, and citizen science repositories across 18 countries. The resulting database has 33,460 records from 5,281 species, of which 1,083 are endemic and 680 threatened. The diversity represented in the dataset is equivalent to 10\% of the total plant species and 26\% of the total terrestrial vertebrate species in the hotspots and corresponds to 0.07\% of their total area. The dataset can be used to estimate and compare biodiversity patterns with environmental parameters and provide value to ecosystems, ecoregions, and protected areas. The dataset is a baseline for future assessments of biodiversity in the face of environmental degradation, climate change, and accelerated extinction processes.Data format 1: The .rds file extension saves a single object to be read in R and provides better compression, serialization, and integration within the R environment, than simple .csv files.Data format 2: The .csv file has been encoded in UTF-8, and is an ASCII file with text separated by commas.Data format 3: We consolidated a shapefile for the basin that contains layers for vegetation ecosystems and the total number of occurrences, number of species, and number of endemic and threatened species for each ecosystem.A set of 3D shaded-relief map representations of the data in the shapefile can be found at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23499180.v4We are also including three taxonomic data tables that were used in our technical validation of the presented dataset. These three files are:1) the_catalog_of_life.tsv (Source: Bánki, O. et al. Catalogue of life checklist (version 2024-03-26). https://doi.org/10.48580/dfz8d (2024))2) world_checklist_of_vascular_plants_names.csv (we are also including ancilliary tables "world_checklist_of_vascular_plants__distribution.csv", and "README_world_checklist_of_vascular_plants_.xlsx") (Source: Govaerts, R., Lughadha, E. N., Black, N., Turner, R. & Paton, A. The World Checklist of Vascular Plants, a continuously updated resource for exploring global plant diversity. Sci. Data 8, 215, 10.1038/s41597-021-00997-6 (2021).)3) world_flora_online.csv (Source: The World Flora Online Consortium et al. World flora online plant list december 2023, 10.5281/zenodo.10425161 (2023).)Source publication and additional context for the dataset: To be announced.