The state of the art in Blue Amazon biodiversity: Protocol for a systematic review

Brazil holds approximately 40 % of its territory in the sea, an area known as the "Blue Amazon" due to its dimension, and strategic, economic and biological significance. Despite this importance, much of Brazil’s marine biodiversity remains poorly mapped and quantified. Therefore, the National Institute of Science and Technology for the Blue Amazon Biodiversity (INCT-BAA) was established to expand knowledge on this region. One of INCT-BAA's primary objectives is to develop an integrated database that combines historical and contemporary information on marine biodiversity. To support this objective, a state-of-the-art systematic literature review was conducted to synthesize existing knowledge on species occurrence, spatial and temporal distribution, natural and anthropogenic threats, ecological scope of studies, and knowledge gaps and trends. Given the broad scope of the review, a specific protocol was developed, requiring adaptations to traditional systematic review methodologies (e.g., elaboration of a robust glossary of categories and methods to extract species locations from papers), which are detailed in this document. The review was conducted over one year using 1,034 search strings across Web of Science, ScienceDirect, and Google Scholar and retrieving over 200,000 species occurrences from 7,687 studies, covering more than 27,000 species from 1917 to 2023.