To determine how well the aquatic plant communities in the Brazilian dry regions were sampled, we searched the Brazilian botanical literature. We registered all papers dealing with aquatic plants in the semiarid region of Brazil we could find. In our compilation, we included all surveys in the semiarid Catting Domain (as compiled by Moro et al., 2014 a,b) or in the dry representational coast of Brazil. We extracted the location, geographical coordinates, sampling method and sampled richness from each paper. If a paper didn't provide geographical coordinates, we extracted one from the map presented in the article as a reference.