Literature survey
The final number of articles was 159, representing 195 studies, covering 211 sites. The northern and southernmost sampling locations were Oiapoque (latitude: 4° N) and Chuí (latitude: 34° S), respectively, spreading across ~7,000 km, representing nearly the entire Brazilian coast. Articles comprised of only one study represented 80% of the total, followed by articles composed by two (11%), three (6%), and four (2%) studies. Only one article presented 6 studies of which only 3 were used based on the second-level filtering criteria listed above (Nunes, Norris, & Knowlton, 2011). The oldest articles were published in 1991 (two articles) and the newest in 2019 (12 articles). Since 1991 the number of publications per year increased, particularly after the year 2001 (four articles/year) when a steady increase is noticed, culminating in the publication of at least 10 articles per year after 2014 (Fig. 2). The five journals with the highest number of articles were listed in Table 1.