Roles of a forest corridor between Marojejy, Anjanaharibe- Sud and Tsaratanana protected areas, northern Madagascar, in maintaining endemic and threatened Malagasy taxa

Site-based conservation is widely recognized as a fundamental requirement for the maintenance of  biodiversity. We carried out a rapid biological assessment from 17 March to 14 May 2011 in the southwestern part of the provisionally protected rainforest corridor between Marojejy, Anjanaharibe-Sud and Tsaratanana protected areas (COMATSA), northern Madagascar, to assess its biodiversity richness and species conservation status. We recorded 248 endemic vertebrate species, including 80 amphibians, 52 reptiles, 79 birds, 27 small mammals and 10 lemurs. Of these 248 species, 36 are threatened including one Critically Endangered (one lemur), nine Endangered (two amphibians, four reptiles and three lemurs) and 26 Vulnerable (10 amphibians, six reptiles, four birds, one small mammal and five lemurs). For herpetofauna species, the pair COMATSAc –cMarojejy was the only site that had a similarity value greater than 0.50. For birds and  lemurs, values of similarity in three pairs of sites COMATSAc –c Marojejy, COMATSA c –c Anjanaharibe-Sud and Marojejyc –c Anjanaharibe-Sud exceeded those of herpetofauna in COMATSAc –c Marojejy. The inclusion of the COMATSA into the new protected area network in Madagascar is supported by our findings. Il est dorénavant largement reconnu que pour maintenir la biodiversité, il est fondamental de réaliser la  conservation de la nature au niveau des sites. Un inventaire biologique rapide a été mené du 17 mars au 14 mai 2011 dans la partie sud-ouest du couloir forestier reliant les parcs et réserves du Marojejy,  d’Anjanaharibe- Sud et du Tsaratanana (COMATSA). L’inventaire de ce couloir qui bénéficie d’un statut de protection temporaire dans la partie septentrionale de Madagascar, était destiné à évaluer la richesse de sa biodiversité et le statut de conservation des espèces de vertébrés qu’il héberge. Les résultats ont   montré que parmi les 248 espèces endémiques de vertébrés recensées, 80 sont des amphibiens, 52 des  reptiles, 79 des oiseaux, 27 des petits mammifères mammifères et 10 des lémuriens. Sur ces 248  espèces, 36 sont menacées, dont une espèce qui est en Danger Critique d’Extinction (lémurien), neuf en Danger (deux amphibiens, quatre reptiles et trois lémuriens) et 26 Vulnérables (1 0 amphibiens, six  reptiles, quatre oiseaux, un micromammifère et cinq lémuriens). Ce couloir forestier présente un  coefficient de similarité élevé, d’une valeur supérieure à 0.50 avec le Marojejy pour les amphibiens et les reptiles. Pour les oiseaux et les lémuriens, les coefficients sont encore plus importants, plus  particulièrement dans les comparaisons COMATSAc –c Marojejy, COMATSAc –c Anjanaharibe- Sud et Marojejyc –c Anjanaharibe-Sud. Cette étude confirme l’importance d’intégrer le COMATSA dans le réseau des Aires Protégées de Madagascar pour renforcer la protection des espèces de vertébrés endémiques et menacées

Protected area surface extension in Madagascar: Do endemism and threatened species remain useful criteria for site selection ?

The ‘hotspot approach’ considers that endemism and threatened species are key factors in protected area designation. Three wetland and forest sites have been proposed to be included into Madagascar’s system of protected areas (SAPM – Système des Aires Protégées de Madagascar). These sites are Manambolomaty (14,701 ha) and Mandrozo (15,145 ha) in the west and Bemanevika (37,041 ha) in the north. Biodiversity inventories of these three sites recorded 243 endemic species comprised of 44 reptiles, 54 amphibians, 104 birds, 23 small mammals, 17 lemurs and one fish. Of these 243 species, 30 are threatened taxa comprising two Critically Endangered (CR), 11 Endangered (EN) and 17 Vulnerable (VU) species. The long term ecological viability of these sites has been shown by population stability of the two Critically Endangered flagship species, the Madagascar fish eagle (Haliaeetus vociferoides) in Manambolomaty and Mandrozo and the recently rediscovered Madagascar pochard (Aythya innotata) in Bemanevika. Other threatened species and high biological diversity also justifies their inclusion into Madagascar’s SAPM

Extracting scientific articles from a large digital archive: BioStor and the Biodiversity Heritage Library

Background: The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is a large digital archive of legacy biological literature, comprising over 31 million pages scanned from books, monographs, and journals. During the digitisation process basic metadata about the scanned items is recorded, but not article-level metadata. Given that the article is the standard unit of citation, this makes it difficult to locate cited literature in BHL. Adding the ability to easily find articles in BHL would greatly enhance the value of the archive. Description: A service was developed to locate articles in BHL based on matching article metadata to BHL metadata using approximate string matching, regular expressions, and string alignment. This article locating service is exposed as a standard OpenURL resolver on the BioStor web site http://biostor.org/openurl/. This resolver can be used on the web, or called by bibliographic tools that support OpenURL. Conclusions: BioStor provides tools for extracting, annotating, and visualising articles from the Biodiversity Heritage Library. BioStor is available from http://biostor.org

First Large-Scale DNA Barcoding Assessment of Reptiles in the Biodiversity Hotspot of Madagascar, Based on Newly Designed COI Primers

BACKGROUND: DNA barcoding of non-avian reptiles based on the cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) gene is still in a very early stage, mainly due to technical problems. Using a newly developed set of reptile-specific primers for COI we present the first comprehensive study targeting the entire reptile fauna of the fourth-largest island in the world, the biodiversity hotspot of Madagascar. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Representatives of the majority of Madagascan non-avian reptile species (including Squamata and Testudines) were sampled and successfully DNA barcoded. The new primer pair achieved a constantly high success rate (72.7-100%) for most squamates. More than 250 species of reptiles (out of the 393 described ones; representing around 64% of the known diversity of species) were barcoded. The average interspecific genetic distance within families ranged from a low of 13.4% in the Boidae to a high of 29.8% in the Gekkonidae. Using the average genetic divergence between sister species as a threshold, 41-48 new candidate (undescribed) species were identified. Simulations were used to evaluate the performance of DNA barcoding as a function of completeness of taxon sampling and fragment length. Compared with available multi-gene phylogenies, DNA barcoding correctly assigned most samples to species, genus and family with high confidence and the analysis of fewer taxa resulted in an increased number of well supported lineages. Shorter marker-lengths generally decreased the number of well supported nodes, but even mini-barcodes of 100 bp correctly assigned many samples to genus and family. CONCLUSIONS/SIGNIFICANCE: The new protocols might help to promote DNA barcoding of reptiles and the established library of reference DNA barcodes will facilitate the molecular identification of Madagascan reptiles. Our results might be useful to easily recognize undescribed diversity (i.e. novel taxa), to resolve taxonomic problems, and to monitor the international pet trade without specialized expert knowledge

First description of a fossil chamaeleonid from Greece and its relevance for the European biogeographic history of the group

The fossil record of Chamaeleonidae is very scarce and any new specimen is therefore considered important for our understanding of the evolutionary and biogeographic history of the group. New specimens from the early Miocene of Aliveri (Evia Island), Greece constitute the only fossils of these lizards from southeastern Europe. Skull roofing material is tentatively attributed to the Czech species Chamaeleo cf. andrusovi, revealing a range extension for this taxon, whereas tooth-bearing elements are described as indeterminate chamaeleonids. The Aliveri fossils rank well among the oldest known reptiles from Greece, provide evidence for the dispersal routes of chameleons out of Africa towards the European continent and, additionally, imply strong affinities with coeval chamaeleonids from Central Europe

Predicting distributions of known and unknown reptile species in Madagascar

Despite the importance of tropical biodiversity(1), informative species distributional data are seldom available for biogeographical study or setting conservation priorities(2,3). Modelling ecological niche distributions of species offers a potential soluion(4-7); however, the utility of old locality data from museums, and of more recent remotely sensed satellite data, remains poorly explored, especially for rapidly changing tropical landscapes. Using 29 modern data sets of environmental land coverage and 621 chameleon occurrence localities from Madagascar ( historical and recent), here we demonstrate a significant ability of our niche models in predicting species distribution. At 11 recently inventoried sites, highest predictive success (85.1%) was obtained for models based only on modern occurrence data (74.7% and 82.8% predictive success, respectively, for pre-1978 and all data combined). Notably, these models also identified three intersecting areas of over-prediction that recently yielded seven chameleon species new to science. We conclude that ecological niche modelling using recent locality records and readily available environmental coverage data provides informative biogeographical data for poorly known tropical landscapes, and offers innovative potential for the discovery of unknown distributional areas and unknown species.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/62843/1/nature02205.pd