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20 December 2023 Leaf-Litter Anurans in An Agricultural Landscape in the araucaria Forest: A Case Study for Southern Brazil
Rodrigo B. Fontana, Noeli Zanella, Sandra M. Hartz
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Abstract

The conversion of natural environments into extensive agricultural monocultures is one of the principal drivers of the ongoing decline and extinction of anuran populations. These processes of landscape modification may modify the structure of natural communities in a variety of ways and at a number of different levels. In this case study, we aimed to evaluate the taxonomic and functional composition of leaf-litter anurans in an agricultural landscape in southern Brazil to understand the relationship between the ecological and morphological traits of these vertebrates and the environment. We sampled forest and plantation environments using pitfall traps and described and quantified the ecological and morphological traits of all the individuals collected in these two environments. We used permutational multivariate analyses of variance (perMANOVA) to evaluate the variation in the composition in the anuran assemblage between the forest and the plantation, a principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) to test the relationship between these traits and the environments, and generalized linear mixed models (GLMM) to evaluate possible patterns of differentiation in the morphological traits of the anurans in the different habitats. Our results indicated that no significant variation exists in the taxonomic and functional composition of the forest and plantation environments, and the functional structure varied only in relation to the body length of the specimens. Although this was a small-scale case study, we found that the anurans tended to exploit different environments according to the functional characteristics of their reproductive modes, habits, and life cycles.

Rodrigo B. Fontana, Noeli Zanella, and Sandra M. Hartz "Leaf-Litter Anurans in An Agricultural Landscape in the araucaria Forest: A Case Study for Southern Brazil," South American Journal of Herpetology 29(1), 27-37, (20 December 2023). https://doi.org/10.2994/SAJH-D-21-00005.1
Received: 26 January 2021; Accepted: 19 April 2023; Published: 20 December 2023
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KEYWORDS
amphibians
body size
crop field
reproductive modes
taxonomic and functional composition
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