What are we missing? Assessing the effects of shortfalls of biodiversity knowledge on amphibian conservation

• Grant number: 18/14128-2
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Post-doctor
• Start date: November 01, 2018
• End date: July 31, 2019
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Ecology - Theoretical Ecology
• Principal Investigator: Célio Fernando Baptista Haddad
• Grantee: Priscila Lemes de Azevedo Silva
• Supervisor: Joaquín Hortal Muñoz
• Host Institution: Instituto de Biociências (IB). Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Campus de Rio Claro. Rio Claro , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN), Spain
• Associated to the scholarship: 14/22344-6 - The effects of climate and land-use changes and their consequences in amphibian conservation in Brazil, BP.PD

Abstract

Biodiversity conservation efforts suffer from a lack of quality data, which is typically biased and presents insufficient coverage. This leads to a common challenge in conservation planning: the high uncertainty on the information about true species distributions. Maps of ignorance can be used to provide a comprehensive illustration to evaluate the reliability of species-occurrence data. Unfortunately, amphibian species have been one of the prominent groups largely affected by habitat fragmentation. This is considered an immediate extinction driver, so the ongoing deforestation increases extinction risk to alarming levels for many endemic species. Here we propose to identify areas of opportunity for amphibian conservation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest that must be addressed with the highest priority. Specifically, we will address three key questions to evaluate: (1) Where are the areas in which new species are predicted to be found? (2) How might the lack of survey coverage affect our estimates of the extinction risk of already known species? (3) How will the effects of ongoing deforestation in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest influence both newly discovered and already known species? (AU)