Cities can host significant biological diversity. Yet, urbanisation leads to the loss of habitats, species, and functional groups. Understanding how multiple taxa respond to urbanisation globally is essential to promote and conserve biodiversity in cities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBody size is a key organismal trait. However, the environmental and evolutionary factors that drive body size patterns at the interspecific level remain unclear. Here, we explored these relationships between phenotype-environment using neotropical frogs of Pristimantis, the world's most diverse vertebrate genus.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWe describe two new species of the genus Pristimantis from the western margin of the Eastern Cordillera of Colombia. The species have a sympatric distribution and are found in the humid tropical forests of the lower part of the Tamá National Natural Park (PNN Tamá) and its buffer zone. The new species were described from morphological comparisons and phylogenetic reconstruction from the sequencing of three mitochondrial and two nuclear genes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLambert question our retrospective and holistic epidemiological assessment of the role of chytridiomycosis in amphibian declines. Their alternative assessment is narrow and provides an incomplete evaluation of evidence. Adopting this approach limits understanding of infectious disease impacts and hampers conservation efforts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Neotropical genus Allobates Zimmerman Zimmerman (1988) is a large monophyletic clade composed of 54 described species distributed between Central America and South America (Frost, 2019; Grant et al., 2017). Twelve species have been recorded in Colombia, mostly distributed in the eastern flank of the Eastern Cordillera and Amazonian Region, although some species reach the Magdalena Valley and the Central and Western Cordillera (Acosta-Galvis, 2017).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAnthropogenic trade and development have broken down dispersal barriers, facilitating the spread of diseases that threaten Earth's biodiversity. We present a global, quantitative assessment of the amphibian chytridiomycosis panzootic, one of the most impactful examples of disease spread, and demonstrate its role in the decline of at least 501 amphibian species over the past half-century, including 90 presumed extinctions. The effects of chytridiomycosis have been greatest in large-bodied, range-restricted anurans in wet climates in the Americas and Australia.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFRhinella marina is a Neotropical toad that has been introduced widely worldwide. Its toxic effects to frog-eating predators threaten the native and domestic fauna of some regions where it has been introduced. Despite previous studies suggesting two genetically distinct cryptic species within R.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe promotion of biodiversity conservation strategies must address the lack of information and the difficulty of identifying knowledge gaps that may facilitate our knowledge of different taxonomic groups. Dung beetles constitute one of those groups, despite having been proposed as an efficient bioindicator of environmental disturbance processes. In this work, we aimed to prepare a diagnosis on the state of knowledge of the subfamily Scarabaeinae, focusing on the cover sampling degree of this group in Colombia, with the purpose of identifying high-priority areas that will allow the completion of a national inventory.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe salamander fauna of Colombia is very poorly known, probably because most research efforts have been devoted to anurans during the last two decades. Here, we describe two new species of the genus Bolitoglossa (Eladinea) from the eastern flank of the Eastern Colombian Andes (Cordillera Oriental), near the border with Venezuela. Bolitoglossa tamaense sp.
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