Land use explains the distribution of threatened New World amphibians better than climate.

ABSTRACT:

Background

We evaluated the direct and indirect influence of climate, land use, phylogenetic structure, species richness and endemism on the distribution of New World threatened amphibians.

Methodology/principal findings

We used the WWF's New World ecoregions, the WWFs amphibian distributional data and the IUCN Red List Categories to obtain the number of threatened species per ecoregion. We analyzed three different scenarios urgent, moderate, and the most inclusive scenario. Using path analysis we evaluated the direct and indirect effects of climate, type of land use, phylogenetic structure, richness and endemism on the number of threatened amphibians in New World ecoregions. In all scenarios we found strong support for direct influences of endemism, the cover of villages an

SUBMITTER: Brum FT 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3628793 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature