Information gaps for the conservation of terrestrial biodiversity

The lacunas system was designed to provide a dynamic tool for ecologists, biologists and conservationists to analyze the ’status of online knowledge’ about species of the flora of the Northeast Region of Southern Africa, namely Mozambique (Moz); Malawi (Mw) and Tanzania (Tz), easily identifying the IUCN Red List categories and criteria and their geographical distributions, thus being able to identify under-sampled areas or collections that have not yet integrated their data online. This tool is currently very important and is used to define strategies for new collections, prioritizing species and/or areas that have not been sampled, as well as identifying taxonomic groups for data entry/digitization. The importance of the geographical coordinates of each organism deposited in the herbaria is enormous, as they ultimately determine the quality and quantity of the occurrence points of mammal species, essential information for modeling the potential distribution of species based on their ecological niche.