Herbário do Lubango

Introduction Malpighiaceae is a tropical to subtropical family of flowering plants comprising ca 75 genera and 1300 species worldwide (Almeida et al. 2023a). Most of its richness is confined to the globe's Neotropical region (i.e. America), with just 15 genera occurring in the Paleotropics (i.e. Africa, Asia and Oceania; POWO 2003).

1 INTRODUCTION Tropical savannas cover 20% of the world's land and supply ecosystem services to hundreds of millions of people (Bond, 2019). They provide habitat for thousands of endemic species composing a rich, ancient, and disturbance-dependent biodiversity (Bond & Parr, 2010; Veldman et al., 2015). These benefits are threatened by two global change processes: woody encroachment (WE) and land conversion for agriculture (Potapov et al., 2022; Stevens et al., 2022).