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Premise: Data on plant distribution and diversity from natural history collections and taxonomic databases are increasingly becoming available online as exemplified by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew's Plants of the World Online (POWO) database. This growing accumulation of biodiversity information requires an advance in bioinformatic tools for accessing and processing the massive data for use in downstream science. We present herein expowo, an open‐source package that facilitates extracting and using botanical data from POWO. Methods and Results: The expowo package is implemented in R and designed to handle the entire vascular plant tree of life. It includes functions to readily distill taxonomic and distributional information about all families, genera, or species of vascular plants. It outputs a complete list of species in each genus of any plant family, with the associated original publication, synonyms, and distribution, and plots global maps of species richness at the country and botanical country levels, as well as graphs displaying species‐discovery accumulation curves and nomenclatural changes over time. To demonstrate expowo's strengths in producing easy‐to‐handle outputs, we also show empirical examples from a set of biodiverse countries and representative species‐rich and ecologically important angiosperm families. Conclusions: By harnessing bioinformatic tools that accommodate varying levels of R programming proficiency, expowo functions assist users who have limited R programming expertise in efficiently distilling specific botanical information from online sources and producing maps and graphics for the further interpretation of biogeographic and taxonomic patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Societal Impact Statement: Understanding of tropical forests has been revolutionized by monitoring in permanent plots. Data from global plot networks have transformed our knowledge of forests' diversity, function, contribution to global biogeochemical cycles, and sensitivity to climate change. Monitoring has thus far been concentrated in rain forests. Despite increasing appreciation of their threatened status, biodiversity, and importance to the global carbon cycle, monitoring in tropical dry forests is still in its infancy. We provide a protocol for permanent monitoring plots in tropical dry forests. Expanding monitoring into dry biomes is critical for overcoming the linked challenges of climate change, land use change, and the biodiversity crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The aim was to test whether species distribution models (SDMs) can reproduce major macroecological patterns in a species‐rich, tropical region and provide recommendations for using SDMs in areas with sparse biotic inventory data. Location: North‐east Brazil, including Minas Gerais. Time period: Present. Major taxa studied: Flowering plants. Methods: Species composition estimates derived from stacked SDMs (s‐SDMs) were compared with data from 1,506 inventories of 933 woody plant species from north‐east Brazil. Both datasets were used in hierarchical clustering analyses to delimit floristic units that correspond to biomes. The ability of s‐SDMs to predict the identity, functional composition and floristic composition of biomes was compared across geographical and environmental space. Results: The s‐SDMs and inventory data both resolved four major biomes that largely corresponded in terms of their distribution, floristics and function. The s‐SDMs proved excellent at identifying broad‐scale biomes and their function, but misassigned many individual sites in complex savanna–forest mosaics. Main conclusions: Our results show that s‐SDMs have a unique role to play in describing macroecological patterns in areas lacking inventory data and for poorly known taxa. s‐SDMs accurately predict floristic and functional macroecological patterns but struggle in areas where non‐climatic factors, such as fire or soil, play key roles in governing distributions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The pantropical genus Begonia is the sixth-largest genus of flowering plants, including 1870 species. The sections of Begonia are used frequently as analogues to genera in other families but, despite their taxonomic utility, few of the current sections have been examined in the light of molecular phylogenetic analyses. We present herein the largest, most representative phylogeny of Begonia published to date and a subsequent provisional sectional classification of the genus. We utilised three plastid markers for 574 species and 809 accessions of Begonia and used Hillebrandia as an outgroup to produce a dated phylogeny. The relationships between some species and sections are poorly resolved, but many sections and deeper nodes receive strong support. We recognise 70 sections of Begonia including 5 new sections: Astrothrix, Ephemera, Jackia, Kollmannia, and Stellandrae; 4 sections are reinstated from synonymy: Australes, Exalabegonia, Latistigma and Pereira; and 5 sections are newly synonymised. The new sectional classification is discussed with reference to identifying characters and previous classifications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim The origin of Neotropical hyperdiversity is one of the most intriguing questions in modern biogeography and is best answered through the investigation of large, pantropically distributed genera, allowing the comparison of closely related clades in different regions. We produced a dated phylogeny and reconstructed ancestral ranges of the megadiverse, Andean-centred genus Begonia to discern its dispersal history throughout the Neotropics and correlates of range evolution. Neotropical and Palaeotropical diversification rates were estimated. Location Neotropics: Central America, South America, West Indies and Mexico. Methods Plastid DNA sequence data from species representing the full geographical range and majority of sections of Neotropical Begonia were analysed with a secondarily calibrated relaxed molecular clock in order to estimate the age of crown groups and divergence times within Neotropical Begonia. Ancestral areas were reconstructed with a Bayesian approach to dispersal-vicariance analysis, a likelihood framework under a dispersal-extinction-cladogenesis model, and a Bayesian binary method. Diversification rates were estimated under a Bayesian framework. Results Biogeographical reconstruction indicated two independent trans-Atlantic colonizations of the Neotropics from Africa. Early-diverging lineages of both clades are reconstructed as having diversified in the mid-Miocene, with multiple dispersal events between the Brazilian Atlantic rain forest and the Andes, and single radiations within the West Indies and Central America plus Mexico. Main conclusions Begonia displays numerous radiations within regions, punctuated by long-distance dispersal. Successful colonization and diversification is predicted by the presence of upland habitat. Recognizing the role of chance dispersal events between available habitats is vital for understanding the formation of current biogeographical patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]