Taxonomic coverage is essential for understanding biodiversity patterns because it reveals which taxonomic groups are represented in a dataset and to what extent. This coverage is continually evolving, driven both by the growth of collections and by the dynamic nature of taxonomy—a discipline in which new species are regularly described and existing names are revised.
The HerbarioDigital.cl dataset (Segovia et al., 2025) is presented here in the context of Chile’s vascular flora. According to the updated version of the Catalogue of Vascular Plants of Chile (Rodríguez et al., 2018), the country harbors 5556 species of vascular plants , distributed across 190 families and 1199 genera. Of these, 4705 species are native, and 2138 of those are endemic, meaning they occur exclusively within Chilean territory.
To date, the digitized collection of Chilean herbaria has reached an overall completeness of approximately 81.3%—that is, this proportion of the native species listed in the catalogue has at least one specimen represented in HerbarioDigital.cl.
Figure 1. Distribution of the number of digitized specimens per species relative to the species listed in the Catalogue of the Vascular Plants of Chile. Bars are divided into three segments: species with more than 5 digitized specimens; species with 1 to 5 specimens; and species that do not yet have digitized specimens.
The information used for this data visualization was updated on: Monday 10 de November at 08:00
Rodríguez, R., Marticorena, C., Alarcón, D., Baeza, C., Cavieres, L., Finot, V. L., Fuentes, N., Kiessling, A., Mihoc, M., Pauchard, A., Ruiz, E., Sánchez, P., & Marticorena, A. (2018). Catálogo de las plantas vasculares de Chile. Gayana. Botánica, 75(1), 1–430. https://doi.org/10.4067/S0717-66432018000100001
Segovia, R. A., Sáez, J. M., Squeo, F. A., Marticorena, A. E., Caro, J., & Guerrero, P. C. (2025).Digitising biological collections to advance National Species Inventories: A case study from the flora of Chile. Plants, People, Planet, 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1002/ppp3.70089