Thousands of sightings mapped for an overlooked desert plant family
Native Plants
If you've ever chewed on a miswak stick for dental hygiene, that's the toothbrush tree, and this kind of mapping work is what helps conservationists track where its wild populations still survive.
This isn't a new discovery so much as a big organizing effort: researchers gathered together more than 7,000 confirmed sightings of plants in the Salvadoraceae family, which includes the toothbrush tree and its relatives. They pulled records from 112 separate databases around the world, filtering out fossils and keeping only entries with real GPS coordinates, so anyone studying where these plants grow can use one clean dataset instead of hunting through a hundred different sources.
Key Findings
7,009 verified occurrence records were compiled for the Salvadoraceae plant family
Data was aggregated from 112 separate biodiversity datasets through GBIF
Records were filtered to include only entries with GPS coordinates and exclude fossil specimens
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists compiled over 7,000 verified location records for the Salvadoraceae plant family, a small group of shrubs and trees from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, pulling together data from 112 different biodiversity databases worldwide.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Occurrence Download
A dataset containing 7009 species occurrences available in GBIF matching the query: { "and" : [ "TaxonKey is Salvadoraceae [Catalogue of Life]", "HasCoordinate is true", { "not" : { "BasisOfRecord"...
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Species Mentioned
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Salvadora persica or the arak, is a small evergreen tree. Other common names include jhal, toothbrush tree, mustard tree, and peelu. Its roots and twigs called miswak are traditionally used for chewing as a toothbrush.