Diversity patterns, research trends and mismatches of the investigative efforts to amphibian conservation in Brazil

Abstract

The number of papers on biology of amphibians has increased in the recent years. A detailed overview of the publications on amphibians can be very useful in assessing the status of our knowledge about this taxonomic group. Due to the large number of articles published, we aimed to assess the scientific contribution of herpetological researches carried out between the years 2001 and 2010 on Brazilian amphibians, considering the diversity patterns, the threats and the research topics that have been published most often. We applied scientometric attention indexes in the reviewed studies from seven scientific databases. To examine the relationship between the numbers of species recorded locally and regionally at different spatial scales, we used an additive partitioning of diversity in three hierarchical levels (i.e., states, geographic regions and biomes). We evaluated 892 articles and 914 species, which showed that 65 % of the total diversity of Brazilian amphibian species was represented by the beta diversity among the biomes. We identified many differences in the allocation of research efforts for taxonomic groups, threats categories, geographic regions, and research topics, highlighting the main research trends conducted and the priority themes for investigation of further papers on Brazilian amphibians.