Are protected areas effective in preserving anurans and promoting biodiversity discoveries in the Brazilian Cerrado?

Abstract

The current biodiversity crisis has stimulated the creation of protected areas, a fundamental conservation tool for halting biodiversity loss. Moreover, protected areas are often accessed by researchers for field observations and natural experiments, thus representing also an important tool promoting biodiversity discoveries. Here, we investigated the importance of protected areas in achieving both conservation and scientific roles for anurans in the Brazilian Cerrado. We specifically compared species richness, species geographical range size, time since species description, and species body size from 173 anurans between 18 protected and seven non-protected areas. We expect that conservation role would be fulfilled if higher species richness is represented into protected than non-protected areas. Similarly, if reserves are effective tools in promoting biodiversity discoveries, we expect a higher number of less detectable (narrow-ranged and small-bodied) and recently described species into protected areas. The estimated species richness was significantly higher in protected than non-protected areas (t = 12.82; df = 6; p < 0.001), whereas species geographic range (t = -3.24; df = 65.9; p = 0.002) and time since the species description (t = -2.49; df = 86.4; p = 0.015) were significantly lower. Species body size did not differ between areas. Our results indicate that reserves positively achieved the conservation role, and have been promoting scientific discoveries of new anurans in the Brazilian Cerrado. However, although favorable for most narrow-ranged anurans surviving, reserves are spatially relatively limited and isolated from each other, precluding large populations and gene flow. Our findings reinforce the need to increase the coverage of protected areas in the Brazilian Cerrado to continue maintaining a considerable number of species, but potentially expanding their geographical ranges and populations, as well as fully supporting biodiversity discoveries.