Fish biodiversity and conservation in South America.
By R. Reis, James S. Albert, F. D. Dario, M. M. Mincarone, P. Petry, Luiz A. Rocha. Journal of Fish Biology, 2016
636 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The freshwater and marine fish faunas of South America are the most diverse on Earth, with current species richness estimates standing above 9100 species. In addition, over the last decade at least 100 species were described every year. There are currently about 5160 freshwater fish species, and the estimate for the freshwater fish fauna alone points to a final diversity between 8000 and 9000 species. South America also has c. 4000 species of marine fishes. The mega-diverse fish faunas of South America evolved over a period of >100 million years, with most lineages tracing origins to Gondwana and the adjacent Tethys Sea. This high diversity was in part maintained by escaping the mass extinctions and biotic turnovers associated with Cenozoic climate cooling, the formation of boreal and temperate zones at high latitudes and aridification in many places at equatorial latitudes. The fresh waters of the continent are divided into 13 basin complexes, large basins consolidated as a single unit plus historically connected adjacent coastal drainages, and smaller coastal basins grouped together on the basis of biogeographic criteria. Species diversity, endemism, noteworthy groups and state of knowledge of each basin complex are described. Marine habitats around South America, both coastal and oceanic, are also described in terms of fish diversity, endemism and state of knowledge. Because of extensive land use changes, hydroelectric damming, water divergence for irrigation, urbanization, sedimentation and overfishing 4-10% of all fish species in South America face some degree of extinction risk, mainly due to habitat loss and degradation. These figures suggest that the conservation status of South American freshwater fish faunas is better than in most other regions of the world, but the marine fishes are as threatened as elsewhere. Conserving the remarkable aquatic habitats and fishes of South America is a growing challenge in face of the rapid anthropogenic changes of the 21st century, and deserves attention from conservationists and policy makers.
Subfields: Aquatic Science, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/e14da24350f34d4bc7f55ea58caa7293e3320f01
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Citations in the corpus
- Non-native species and invasion biology in a megadiverse country: scientometric analysis and ecological interactions in Brazil (2016, background): “For instance, in a recent review about conservation in South America Reis et al. (2016) largely ignored non-native species and biological invasions such as real roots of many actual threats to fishes and all aquatic biodiversity.”
- Biogeography of Amazonian fishes: deconstructing river basins as biogeographic units (2017, background): “The fish community inhabiting the Amazon basin is the largest freshwater ichthyofauna in the world, with almost 2,500 described species and a continuing parade of newly discovered taxa (Lundberg et al., 2010; Reis et al., 2016).”
- South‐western Atlantic reef fishes: Zoogeographical patterns and ecological drivers reveal a secondary biodiversity centre in the Atlantic Ocean (2018, background): “…endemism, evolution, periphery, threatened species the Amazon River mouth (on the equator) to the state of Santa Catarina (29°S), includes oceanic islands as peripheral outposts and is closely related to the Caribbean Province (Floeter et al., 2008; Kulbicki et al., 2013; Reis et al., 2016).”
- The Fishes of the Amazon: Distribution and Biogeographical Patterns, with a Comprehensive List of Species (2019, background): “Estimates of fish diversity in continents follow Lévêque et al. (2008), except for Europe, which is based on Kottelat and Freyhof (2007); South America, based on Reis et al. (2016); and Central America, based on Matamoros et al. (2015).”
- Small-sized fish: the largest and most threatened portion of the megadiverse neotropical freshwater fish fauna (2020, background): “In a more recent review of the South American fish diversity, Reis et al. (2016) estimated the total number of freshwater fish species around 5.600, pointing to a final diversity between 8.000 and 9.000 species!”
- The changing course of the Amazon River in the Neogene: center stage for Neotropical diversification (2018, background): “…understanding the coevolution of landscape and life than in Greater Amazonia, a biodiversity province that extends over 8.4 million km 2 of Amazon and Orinoco lowlands and adjacent portions of the Guiana and Brazilian Shields (Albert et al ., 2011a; Reis et al ., 2016; Van der Sleen, Albert, 2017).”