Appendix 1 - Records of freshwater fish at different altitudes in Brazil

Appendix 1 related to the article : Guedes GHS, Luz CHP, Souza VJ, Araújo FG (2025) A fish frontier? Itatiaia expedition and biodiversity repositories reveal gaps in fish occurrences in Brazil’s high-altitude aquatic ecosystems. Zoologia 42: e24077. https://doi.org/10.1590/S1984-4689.v42.e24077 To pinpoint gaps in our understanding of fish occurrences above 2,000 m in Brazil, we retrieved records from three major open‐access repositories of museum and collection data: SpeciesLink (http://specieslink.net), Salve (http://salve.icmbio.gov.br), and the Brazilian node of GBIF, SiBBr (http://sibbr.gov.br). These platforms were chosen for their comprehensive coverage of Brazilian biological collections and, in Salve’s case, its inclusion of records tied to collection permits, threatened species, and surveys within federal conservation units—critical, since Brazil’s highest elevations lie inside protected areas (ICMBio 2024). We applied tailored primary filters to each database to suit their respective query systems. In SpeciesLink, we searched “Actinopterygii,” retrieving 426 125 records. In Salve/ICMBio, we used “continental fishes,” yielding 246 313 entries. In SiBBr, we combined “Actinopterygii,” “present,” and “Brazil,” limiting results to the “collection” attribute and obtaining 325 445 records. Altogether, these queries produced 997 893 occurrence records. All searches were performed in October 2024, and the full dataset is provided in Supplementary Information S1. To assign elevation to each record, we overlaid their geographic coordinates onto a global Digital Surface Model (DSM) with ~30 m horizontal resolution (~1 arc-second) from the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (http://www.eorc.jaxa.jp). Using QGIS 3.32 “Lima” (QGIS Core Team 2024) and the Point Sampling Tool plugin within the WGS 84 CRS, we extracted the altitude (m a.s.l.) for every occurrence.