The genus Scinax is one of the most specious genera of treefrogs of the family Hylidae. Despite the high number of potential new species of Scinax revealed in recent studies, the rate of species descriptions for Amazonia has been low in the last decade. A potential cause of this low rate may be the existence of morphologically cryptic species. Describing new species may not only impact the taxonomy and systemat...
Mechanisms generating and maintaining biodiversity at regional scales may be evaluated by quantifying β-diversity along environmental gradients. Differences in assemblages result in biotic complementarities and redundancies among sites, which may be quantified through multi-dimensional approaches incorporating taxonomic β-diversity (TBD), functional β-diversity (FBD) and phylogenetic β-diversity (PBD). Here we ...
Knowledge of genetic structure, geographic distance and environmental heterogeneity can be used to identify environmental features and natural history traits that influence dispersal and gene flow. Foraging mode is a trait that might predict dispersal capacity in snakes, because actively foragers typically have greater movement rates than ambush predators. Here, we test the hypothesis that 2 actively foraging s...
Osteocephalus vilarsi (Melin, 1941) is an Amazonian treefrog species known for over 75 years from its holotype only. Due to a lack of published data on its morphological diagnostic characters and their variations, as well as the absence of molecular, acoustic and ecological data supporting its identity, a highly dynamic taxonomic history has led this species to be confused and even synonymised with other Osteoc...
A new tree frog species of the genus Scinax from the interfluve between the Purus and Madeira rivers, Brazilian Amazonia, is described and illustrated. The new species is diagnosed by medium body size, snout truncate in dorsal view, ulnar and tarsal tubercles absent, nuptial pads poorly developed, skin on dorsum shagreen, dorsum light brown with dark brown spots and markings, white groin with black spots, anter...
Rising habitat loss is one of the main drivers of the global amphibian decline. Nevertheless, knowledge of amphibian diversity needed for effective habitat protection is still highly inadequate in remote tropical regions, the greater part of the Amazonia. In this study we integrated molecular, morphological and bioacoustic evidence to evaluate the species richness of the treefrogs genus Scinax over a 1000 km tr...