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Summary: Strong paleoclimatic change and few Late Quaternary megafauna extinctions make mainland Africa unique among continents. Here, we hypothesize that, compared with elsewhere, these conditions created the ecological opportunity for the macroevolution and geographic distribution of large fruits.We assembled global phylogenetic, distribution and fruit size data for palms (Arecaceae), a pantropical, vertebrate‐dispersed family with > 2600 species, and integrated these with data on extinction‐driven body size reduction in mammalian frugivore assemblages since the Late Quaternary. We applied evolutionary trait, linear and null models to identify the selective pressures that have shaped fruit sizes.We show that African palm lineages have evolved towards larger fruit sizes and exhibited faster trait evolutionary rates than lineages elsewhere. Furthermore, the global distribution of the largest palm fruits across species assemblages was explained by occurrence in Africa, especially under low canopies, and extant megafauna, but not by mammalian downsizing. These patterns strongly deviated from expectations under a null model of stochastic (Brownian motion) evolution.Our results suggest that Africa provided a distinct evolutionary arena for palm fruit size evolution. We argue that megafaunal abundance and the expansion of savanna habitat since the Miocene provided selective advantages for the persistence of African plants with large fruits. This article is part of the Special Collection 'Global plant diversity and distribution'. See https://www.newphytologist.org/global-plant-diversity for more details. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital accessible knowledge of biodiversity data is an increasingly important source of information in studies of biogeography and conservation. These databases can also reveal temporal, spatial and taxonomical gaps in biodiversity documentation, even in areas that have been intensively studied and from where accurate species lists are available. Therefore, revealing these gaps may help allocating collecting efforts, conservation priorities and strategies for improving database curation. Here, we evaluate potential shortfalls for flowering plants in a tropical hotspot, the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, by cross‐referencing two online repositories of biodiversity data (the Global Biodiversity Information Facility – GBIF – and the Brazilian Flora 2020 floristic database – BFG). We aimed to evaluate the congruence between those repositories, highlighting tendencies in current documentation for this area. We found that from the 7220 reported flowering plant species endemics to the Atlantic Forest, 1573 (22%) have no valid spatial data in GBIF, and 75% of all of the 605,951 records do not present valid spatial information. Most of the missing information is related to species known only from few and old collections with absent or inaccurately georeferenced data. This lack of information may cause a large impact in spatial studies, especially for rare and threatened species. Nevertheless, our analysis also shows that spatial information for the filtered data is highly congruent between GBIF and BFG data, indicating relatively high availability of quality data in large repositories after standard and automatized cleaning procedures. Still, good practices to decrease the impact of losing data are recommended, including more investment in field collections, targeting poorly known species and returning cleaned spatial datasets to online repositories after taxonomic revisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We estimated phylogenetic relationships of Polygala inferred from nrITS, matK‐trnK, trnL intron, trnL‐trnF intergenic spacer, and rbcL sequence data, with emphasis on the New World clade. Our results did not support the New World and Old World clades as sister groups in Polygala. Relationships among Polygala and allied genera are being discussed, with the recovered clades compared to those of the current taxonomic delimitations. A biogeographic analysis using an ultrametric phylogenetic tree and calibrated with the fossil Paleosecuridaca as well as a reconstruction of the ancestral area are also provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]