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Abstract. Brazil harbors the greatest diversity of amphibians on the planet although there are few studies dealing with urban fauna. The objective of this study is to describe the species composition and richness of anurans in urban Cerrado fragments from Campo Grande municipality, Mato Grosso do Sul state, central Brazil. The specimens were sampled in three stages through pitfall traps and visual/acoustic surveys. Seventeen species were recorded (17.7% of anuran species registered in Mato Grosso do Sul), with Leptodactylidae and Hylidae being the most represented families. The existence of a high number of green areas and water bodies in the urban area likely favors anuran species in the region. The anuran communities in urban areas of Campo Grande were dominated by species which use a broad range of habitats. In this study there was the record of a new species of anuran, Proceratophrys dibernardoi, for the state of Mato Grosso do Sul. The forest fragments that had the highest similarity for species composition were those with similar environmental conditions. The knowledge of the fauna that occurs in urban areas is important because natural habitats suffer severe fragmentation and degradation and species present in these areas may disappear in a shorter period of time.
Keywords. Anuran, city, urbanization, Cerrado, habitat fragmentation.
Submitted on: 2016, 21st April; revised on: 2017, 15th April; accepted on: 2017, 25th May
Editor: Gentile Francesco Ficetola
INTRODUCTION
There are approximately 7,600 amphibian species in the world (Frost, 2017), most of them occurring in tropical regions where natural landscapes have been altered by human activities (Ellis and Ramankutty, 2008). Brazil has 1,080 amphibian species (Segalla et al., 2016) and at least 209 are recorded for the Cerrado and adjoining biomes (Valdujo et al., 2012). The Cerrado is a biodiversity hotspot being currently affected by landscape changes (Soares-Filho et al., 2014) and so conservation strategies must be viewed as a priority (Overbeck et al., 2015). Threats to the Cerrado domain and associated biodiversity include land conversion for agriculture and pasture as well as urban expansion (Klink and Machado, 2005), which in turn can result in the isolation and reduction of the population size of several species and cause local extinctions.
Amphibians are amongst the most endangered vertebrate groups in the world (Stuart et...