Biotechnological Potential of Atlantic Forest Native Trees

Forest restoration is crucial to mitigate human impacts on climate, biodiversity, and ecosystem services. However, it is still monetarily non-competitive due to high costs and low economic returns, urging attractive alternatives. Non-timber forest products with a high economic value could provide a way forward, requiring knowledge of options and native species' potential. To summarize scientific knowledge about species potential, challenges, and opportunities, we conducted a forest inventory of regenerating forests in the southeast Atlantic Forest, Brazil. Our survey identified native tree species of the Atlantic Forest, which possess a significant biotechnological potential for applications in medicine, cosmetics, crop maintaining activities, food and other market segments. This database shows the biotechnological potential of the species identified and was built to support the publication the author's publications. The activities were conducted at the Tropical Silviculture Lab (LASTROP) at the University of São Paulo (ESALQ)  and the Ecology and Forest Restoration Lab (LERF) at the University of São Paulo (ESALQ). 

After achieving the final list (n=143) of native forest species, we gathered scientific information about their potential biotechnological use by searching peer-reviewed literature through the Web of Science (WoS) platform. We used a different search string for retrieving information for each species, searching for titles, abstracts, and keywords of related publications. Each search string was based on applying to the 'topic field' (the scientific name(s) of species) AND (properties* OR compound* OR utility* OR product* OR application* OR medicine* OR pharmaceutical* OR cosmetic* OR food * OR biotechnology). We tried to select a minimum of five bibliographic references for each species (i.e., primary studies describing their potential biotechnological use). After identifying the species' biotechnological potential, we survey to discover the proportion of these species with patents registering worldwide, using the European Patent Office - EPO platform. The purpose of our search was not to be exhaustive nor to describe all the biotechnological uses of each species but rather to give a broad overview of their biotechnological capabilities. The concept of investigating forest species for their biotechnological potential is not a new one. However, the restoration literature does not explicitly discuss how we present it.

We used two fundamental bibliometric indicators related to research quality to select the references: the number of citations and the journal impact factors (Aksnes et al. 2019; Romanelli et al. 2021). Research quality is considered a multidimensional concept (Aksnes et al. 2019). Albeit, we focused on aspects related to scientific value (i.e., the importance of outcomes for other research) by selecting these two criteria (i.e., citations and journal impact factor). Despite their recognised limitations to indicate research quality purely, 'citations' may reflect both scientific impact and relevance. The impact factor (IF) is a metric that provides information on scientific ranking (Romanelli et al. 2018; Romanelli et al. 2021) and journal prestige—the higher, the better—thus, it also tends to reflect research quality (Grech and Rizk 2018). Accordingly, we acknowledge that our inclusion criteria (i.e., the set of criteria used to select primary studies) are biased by performance indicators.

Nonetheless, we consider our results reliable and inaugurate a new framework to promote the socioeconomic aspects of restoration by expanding ecosystem services from forest species. Despite using these criteria as a guide, we could not establish rigid criteria sets for selecting references due to the disparity in the number of publications found for each forest species (Mean + SD), accounting for cases where we found less than five publications.