PN Montanhas do Tumucumaque and Flona Jamari have their lists published in the Catalog of Plants of Brazil's Conservation Units.

Two new lists of flora from protected areas in the Amazon have been published in the Catalog of Plants of Brazil's Conservation Units. The lists for the Montanhas do Tumucumaque National Park (PNMT) and the Jamari National Forest were released at the event Unveiling the Flora of the Amazon: science and collaboration for new opportunities, which brought together researchers and experts from various institutions at the Rio de Janeiro Botanical Garden on November 10.

Tumucumaque - The PNMT is the largest national park in Brazil and the largest tropical forest conservation unit in the world, covering 3,865,000 hectares and crossed by the headwaters of the Araguari, Amapari, Oiapoque, and Jari rivers. Most of its area is located in the state of Amapá (98.8% of the total), in the municipalities of Laranjal do Jari, Oiapoque, Calçoene, Serra do Navio, and Pedra Branca do Amapari. The remainder is in Pará (1.2%), in the municipality of Almeirim.

The PNMT List contains 664 species, of which 9 are categorized as endangered. Of the total number of species listed, 592 are angiosperms, 2 are gymnosperms, and 70 are ferns and lycophytes. However, these numbers represent only what could be gathered from collections made after the park was created in 2002. Older collections in the region were not used in compiling the list due to the difficulty in determining whether they actually occurred within the area currently belonging to the conservation unit. For this reason, the authors chose to also publish, as an appendix, a complementary list of unconfirmed records for the PNMT.

The Montanhas do Tumucumaque National Park is home to an important population of red angelim (Dinizia excelsa Ducke) - giant Amazonian trees that can exceed 80m in height (more than twice the height of Christ the Redeemer with its pedestal). Despite its importance for Brazilian biodiversity, the PNMT faces threats from illegal gold mining, predatory hunting and fishing, illegal logging and non-timber products, and illegal occupations on the banks of the Oiapoque River.

“Compiling the list for Tumucumaque Mountains National Park was a challenge due to the difficulty in confirming the geographical origin of many historical collections, especially in such a vast and remote region. Even so, this list represents an essential step toward recognizing and valuing its flora. A territory that, despite its immensity, is home to endangered and little-known species, revealing how much there is still to protect in the Amazon," says researcher Thuane Bochorny, the list's first author.

Allamanda cathartica L., from the Apocynaceae family, is one of the beauties found in the PNMT | Photo: Herison Medeiros

Jamari - The Jamari National Forest was created in 1984 in the state of Rondônia and covers approximately 220,000 hectares, encompassing part of the municipalities of Itapuã do Oeste, Candeias do Jamari, and Ariquemes. This conservation unit was the first national forest established in the Legal Amazon to reconcile sustainable exploitation and conservation. In the 2000s, it also became the country's first national forest under the concession-based forest management model.

The Jamari National Forest List includes 104 families and 302 genera, with a total of 570 species of vascular plants, 23 of which are classified as endangered. The collections began in the 1980s and gained momentum in 2013 with the Rondônia Flora Project - a partnership between the Federal University of Rondônia (UNIR) and the New York Botanical Garden (NYBG) - and with the expeditions of the Monitora/ICMBio Program in 2017 and 2023.

One of the highlights of Flona Jamari is the record of a rare species, Protium herisonii (Burseraceae), described in 2023, and whose second collection in the state took place now in 2025. Discoveries like this suggest that the list is likely to grow in the coming years. "This is a first list, we know that not all species are included. Many of the approximately 4,900 samples collected so far have not yet been identified," explains the first author of the publication, Flávio Obermuller (NYBG/JBRJ). Researchers believe that there are still many gaps to be filled in the knowledge of the flora of this conservation unit, especially in relation to less studied groups, such as epiphytes, pteridophytes, and shrub species.

With the two new publications, the Catalog of Plants of Brazil's Conservation Units now has 61 lists available. The challenge, however, is still immense, as Brazil currently has 3,158 conservation units of various categories. In the Amazon alone, there are 351 conservation units, of which 134 are federal, 90 are for sustainable use, and 44 are for integral protection.

Among the initiatives to accelerate knowledge of species in conservation units is catalogoUCsBR, a package of applications for building species lists, which was also presented at the event on November 10. Two other tools presented to facilitate the work of botanists and ecologists were the RIPA platform - Resources for the Identification of Amazonian Plants, and forplotR: an application for managing data from permanent forest monitoring plots.

Access the List of Plants of the Tumucumaque Mountains National Park.

Access the List of Plants of the Jamari National Forest.

See the Catalog of Plants of Brazil's Conservation Units.

Watch the videos of the event Unveiling the Flora of the Amazon: science and collaboration for new opportunities:
Part 1.
Part 2.