Historical distribution and current drivers of guppy occurrence in Brazil

This data set was used in the paper "Historical distribution and current drivers of guppy occurrence in Brazil". The file consist of occurrence records of Poecilia reticulata in Brazil over different time periods. In order to evaluate the historical and current distribution of P. reticulata, we searched for occurrence records in two major data sources. We first compiled data from all the studies cited in the recent comprehensive review of studies of Brazilian stream fish assemblages (Dias et al., 2016). We performed this search by using electronic databases and search engines (i.e., Web of Knowledge, Google Scholar, and Scielo) to look for primary studies and published papers from Brazilian journals that provide occurrence records of P. reticulata in Brazil. We also used combinations of the following search terms, in English and Portuguese: “guppy fish”, “non-native”, “nonindigenous aquatic species”, and “Poecilia reticulata”; this second search provided additional published papers mentioning this species in Brazilian territory. Both the papers and supplementary information were screened in order to find the geographical coordinates of the sampling points where this species has been detected. As a third data source, we used all the available records of P. reticulata from the SpeciesLink website (http://splink.cria.org.br/, accessed 2016), which aggregates species occurrence data from major biological collections worldwide, including those from Brazilian institutions. We extracted from this platform all the associated informations (e.g., the location and the associated geographical coordinates; the sampling dates containing year, month, and day; and the names of researchers who composed the sampling teams). From these three sources, we created a database of the occurrence of P. reticulata in Brazil.

Some records were excluded because the geographical coordinates and/or sampling dates were not provided in detail, or could not be determined directly or from information in the publication itself (Dias et al., 2016). Overall, incomplete and discarded records comprised only 0.7% (12 out of 1649 records) of our dataset. We further used the sampling dates and associated collector information to remove duplicate records from the database. By this means, multiple records of P. reticulata with the identical geographical coordinates were compared in terms of the sampling day, month, year, and collector(s). If all the information was identical, only one record was included. On the other hand, multiple records of P. reticulata from the same location but with different dates and collectors were retained in the final database. This final database was composed of 1402 records and was used to investigate the occurrence of P. reticulata over time.

References

Dias, M. S., J. Zuanon, T. B. A. Couto, M. Carvalho, L. N. Carvalho, H. M. V. Espírito-Santo, R. Frederico, R. P. Leitão, A. F. Mortati, T. H. S. Pires, G. Torrente-Vilara, J. do Vale, M. B. dos Anjos, F. P. Mendonça, & P. A. Tedesco, 2016. Trends in studies of Brazilian stream fish assemblages. Natureza & Conservação 14: 106–111.