Literature-based occurrences data of marine species in Venezuela

Venezuela has suffered a severe academic and research management crisis funding opportunities for marine data have been practically absent. This worsened over the past five years and, as result, libraries other institutional spaces repeatedly vandalised, with hundreds of records, specimens historical stolen, destroyed or burned. To avoid loss irreplaceable on Venezuelan biodiversity, an initiative was promoted, aimed at digitising information to create rich dataset biodiversity emphasis protected areas country, well fill gaps in distribution status Venezuela. Nighteen (19) institutions country focusing science consistently produced wealth about Venezuela’s form specimen collections, unpublished sampled theses through work researchers students. An inventory available sources these national conducted under National Biodiversity Data Mobilization Grant Information Development Program, together Global Facility (GBIF) support. All recovered processed datasets were published Ocean System (OBIS) repositories. occurrences collection represents major contribution It is based numerous papers, reports, books checklists provided by experts, covering broad taxonomic from which we obtained species (present absent), organised into 59 containing 40,881 records. 28.49% records reported OBIS (143,513 until November 2022). The extracted showed 3,041 species, representatives each six kingdoms: Animalia, Chromista, Bacteria, Plantae, Fungi Protozoa. provide occurrence since 1822, extending temporal coverage Venezuela, established 1879 before this project. number increased 41.3% compared Most (63.47%) registered Marine Protected Areas. included non-native descriptions new listed different IUCN categories.