Amphibians and reptiles of Parque Nacional da Serra das Lontras: an important center of endemism within the Atlantic Forest in southern Bahia, Brazil

Abstract

Information gaps about species distribution hamper the evaluation of conservation status and decisions on biodiversity conservation, affecting to a greater extent, areas with high species richness and endemism. In this context, biological inventories are an important tool to fill these gaps by providing data on the composition, richness, and abundance of species in each locality. The Parque Nacional da Serra das Lontras (PNSL) protects various mountain range just up 1000 m. in altitude, and, together with other conservation units, forms an ecological corridor in the southern part of the state of Bahia, within the Atlantic Forest hotspot. We conducted systematic samplings on transects, and opportunistic records in ponds and streams, in order to record amphibian and reptile species in the PNSL. We complement the sampling with the information available in the literature and in scientific collections. A total of 100 species (49 amphibians and 51 reptiles) was recorded, 53 of them endemic to the Atlantic Forest, 13 to the state of Bahia, and two known only from the PNSL. Hylidae was the most diverse family of amphibians (22 spp.) and Colubridae of reptiles (33 spp.). New information on the distribution and natural history of these species is provided, many of which have not yet been assessed by the IUCN while others have already been categorized as at risk of extinction at the regional level. Results confirm the high species richness and rates of endemism in southern Bahia and highlight the importance of protecting high altitude areas for the preservation of evolutionary and ecological processes within the Atlantic Forest.

Amphibians and reptiles of the Atlantic Forest in Recôncavo Baiano, east Brazil: Cruz das Almas municipality

“…The two amphisbaenian species identified in our study are common and frequently recorded in the Atlantic Forest inventories from the Brazilian northeast (Couto-Ferreira et al 2011;Freitas et al 2018;Mesquita et al 2018). Despite the fossorial habit of the group, the number of species recorded in our study was similar to that recorded in other studies in the Atlantic Forest (Santana et al 2008;Roberto et al 2017;Rojas-Padilla et al 2020). Perhaps the long-term fieldwork and the use of different methods of data collection have been important to record these organisms.…”

“…Observing the richness of only the assemblages within the State of Bahia, the richness found in the present study was inferior to the richness of lizards from the northern coast (Couto-Ferreira et al 2011, n = 23), Serra da Jibóia (Freitas et al 2018, n = 19), and Serra do Timbó (Freitas et al 2019, n = 19). However, the richness of Cruz das Almas lizards was higher than that recorded for nine sand dunes of the southern and northern coast of Bahia (Dias and Rocha 2014, n = 4-11), mountainous forests in southern Bahia (Rojas-Padilla et al 2020, n = 7), fragments of ombrophilous forest of southeast Bahia (Dias et al 2014b, n = 3 or 4), and the semideciduous seasonal forest of southeast Bahia (Souza- Costa et al 2020, n = 6). Although the richness estimators revealed that there are lizard species that have not yet been sampled in the Cruz das Almas assemblage, their values were low, indicating that there may be few species.…”

“…However, the richness value was lower than that observed in some snake assemblages in southeast Brazil (Condez et al 2009, n = 46;Forlani et al 2010, n = 48;Moura et al 2012, n = 29) and north of the São Francisco River (Mesquita et al 2018, n = 42). Within Bahia State, the snake richness of Cruz das Almas was lower than that registered on the northern coast (Marques et al 2016, n = 50), Serra da Jibóia (Freitas et al 2018, n = 37) and the southern and southeastern forests (Argôlo 2004, n = 61;Rojas-Padilla et al 2020, n = 41) of the State. Moreover, the richness of snakes was greater than that obtained by Dias et al (2014b) for four localities between the municipalities of Almadina, Floresta Azul, Ilhéus in southeast Bahia (5-8 species), and by Dias and Rocha (2014), who investigated the composition of snakes in nine localities of the sand dunes of Bahia (0-4 species).…”

“…The State of Bahia is a state with great richness of herpetofauna species (Hamdan and Lira-da-Silva 2012;Dias and Rocha 2014;Freitas et al 2019). Although in recent years many studies have been developed to characterise the herpetofauna of this state (see Freitas et al 2016aFreitas et al , b, 2018Gondim-Silva et al 2016;Marques et al 2016;Mira-Mendes et al 2018;Leite et al 2019;Souza-Costa et al 2020;Rojas-Padilla et al 2020), the vast majority of these initiatives were limited to investigations in specific regions, especially areas of dense ombrophilous forest in the south and southeast of the state (Argôlo 2004;Camurugi et al 2010;Dias et al 2014a;Mira-Mendes et al 2018;Rojas-Padilla et al 2020;Souza-Costa et al 2020), sand dune areas on the northern coast of the state (Tinôco et al 2007;Dias and Rocha 2014;Gondim-Silva et al 2016;Marques et al 2016;) and high-elevation regions of Chapada Diamantina (northern portion of Serra do Espinhaço) (Leite et al 2008;Xavier and Napoli 2011;Freitas et al 2012;Magalhães et al 2015). Allied to this, many of these studies were carried out within protected areas (Leite et al 2008;Camurugi et al 2010;Freitas et al 2012;Garda et al 2013;Dias et al 2014a;Magalhães et al 2015;Mira-Mendes et al 2018;Rojas-Padilla et al 2020), high-lighting information gaps on the herpetofauna of unprotected areas, making it difficult to identify new areas of ecological relevance.…”

Areas of endemism of Pteridaceae (Polypodiopsida) in Brazil: a first approach

“…Studies with diverse groups of organisms found AoE similar to our data, such as those for angiosperms (Prance, 1982;Thomas et al, 1998;Tabarelli et al, 2005;Murray-Smith et al, 2008;Sigrist and Carvalho, 2008;Werneck et al, 2011;Menini-Neto et al, 2016;Ostroski et al, 2020), amphibians (Rojas-Padilla et al, 2020, arthropods (Sigrist and Carvalho, 2008;Hoffmeister and Ferrari, 2016), bees (Garraffoni et al, 2017), beetles (Silva and Vaz-de-Mello, 2020), birds (Silva et al, 2004), harvestmen (Da Silva et al, 2015, reptiles (Rojas-Padilla et al, 2020) and other vertebrates (Tabarelli et al, 2005;Sigrist and Carvalho, 2008).…”