Fabiula Moreno Arantes, Luiza F.A. De Paula‡, Rafaela Campostrini Forzza§Corresponding author: Fabiula Arantes ( fabiula.arantes@gmail.com ) © Fabiula Arantes, Luiza De Paula, Rafaela Forzza. This is an open access preprint distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Arantes FM, De Paula LF.A, Forzza RC (2023) Checklist of the rupicolous vascular plant species on inselbergs in the Monumento Natural dos Pontões Capixabas, Espírito Santo, Brazil. ARPHA Preprints. https://doi.org/10.3897/arphapreprints.e105792 |  |
Inselbergs are granitic and/or gneissic rocky outcrops and, in Brazil, the dome-shaped ones are called sugarloaves (pães de açúcar). They have an extremely specialized vegetation with high levels of endemism. Despite this, they are poorly studied and highly degraded. In northeastern Espírito Santo State, in southeastern Brazil, the Monumento Natural dos Pontões Capixabas (MONAPC) is a federal protected area created to guard some inselbergs threatened by mining, which is one of the main activities in the state. In this work, we provide the first checklist of the rupicolous vascular plant species in this protected area, which is based on field expeditions and searching for occurrence records in virtual herbaria.
We recorded 105 species in 36 families and 74 genera that inhabit the vegetation islands on the inselbergs within the official limits of MONAPC. A new species of Pleroma (Melastomataceae) was discovered and, it is being described.