New app package streamlines the creation and publication of lists of plants in Brazilian conservation units

An article published in July in the journal Applications in Plant Sciences, from the Botanical Society of America, presents the catalogoUCsRB, a new package developed in R as a Shiny application to automate a series of tasks in the process of preparing and publishing species lists in the Catalog of Plants of Brazilian Conservation Units.

Launched in 2018, the Catalog of Plants of Brazil's Conservation Units publishes online lists of species found in Brazilian conservation units with data from digitized herbarium collections, reaching 57 publications in August 2025. These lists are an important tool not only for researchers, but especially for conservation unit managers, who can access information and knowledge about the composition of their unit's flora and the assessment of species extinction risk, among other data essential for planning and implementing conservation actions.

The article explains the main functions of the catalogoUCsBR package, which facilitates work and streamlines publications: combining herbarium records into a standardized format, removing duplicates from different databases, extracting information on accepted species names, facilitating taxonomic review through images and digitized labels from herbarium collections, and publishing the list of species in the Catalog.

The catalogoUCsRB package was developed by Thuane Bochorny and Pablo H. A. de Melo, authors of the article, which also had Rafaela Campostrini Forzza as co-author. Consisting of three apps, the package is openly accessible online on the Brazilian Conservation Units Catalog platform, as well as directly at http://app-catalogo-ucs-brasil.jbrj.gov.br, or through the R program by installing the catalogoUCsBR package.

“We hope that this app will facilitate the expansion of publications of lists in the Catalog of Conservation Units in Brazil. We have been growing steadily since 2018, but as Brazil has a huge network of Conservation Units, it would still take a long time to have all the lists of all Conservation Units in the Catalog. Thus, the app is a way to improve, facilitate, and streamline this work,” says researcher Rafaela Forzza.