The dry season is between August and January, with 353 mm of average monthly precipitation and 23.9 ☌ of average monthly temperature ( INAMHI, 2015). The rainy season extends between March and July, with 448 mm of monthly average rainfall and 23.5 ☌ of monthly average temperature. The average annual rainfall is 4,620 mm, and the average annual temperature is 28.7 ☌. This ecosystem is usually covered by mist, either constantly or during the early morning and late afternoon ( Ramis, Álvarez-Solas & Peñuela, 2018). Those trees reach up to 15–25 m in height, showing gnarled trunks and branches, and dense and compact crowns covered by epiphytes, including orchids, bromeliads, aroids, and ferns ( Ministerio del Ambiente del Ecuador, 2012, 2013). Montane evergreen cloud forests in Colonso-Chalupas are characterised by a great variety of trees of the families Melastomataceae, Solanaceae, Myrsinaceae, Aquifoliaceae, Araliaceae, Rubiaceae. It is part of an ecological corridor with two neighbouring protected areas: Antisana Ecological Reserve, to the north, and Llanganates National Park, to the south ( Ramis, Álvarez-Solas & Peñuela, 2018 Van der Hoek et al., 2018). This biological reserve protects 932.46 km 2, extending between 560–4,432 m elevation and being home to a variety of ecosystems, from tropical evergreen forests to paramos ( Van der Hoek et al., 2018). The Colonso-Chalupas Biological Reserve is a national protected area located on the foothills of the north-eastern Andes of Ecuador, in the province of Napo.
Materials and methods Study area and field surveys Based in this findings, we provide new information about the morphological and chromatic variation, natural history, conservation status and extinction risk and reveal for the first time the phylogenetic position of N.
laurae was classified as Endangered at the national level ( Ortega-Andrade et al., 2021) and Critically Endangered at the global level ( Cisneros-Heredia, 2008).īetween 2016–2018, we collected two individuals of Nymphargus laurae at the Colonso-Chalupas Biological Reserve. Due to its apparent rarity, restricted distribution, and extensive habitat change and loss at the type-locality, N. laurae along the eastern slopes of the Andes of Ecuador without success. Since its description, numerous herpetologists have searched for N. laurae, and no additional individuals or information has become available for the species ( Guayasamin et al., 2020). More than 60 years have passed since the collection of the holotype and single known specimen of N. Laura’s Glassfrog Nymphargus laurae was described based on a male specimen collected in 1955 at Loreto, on the north-eastern foothills of the Andes of Ecuador ( Cisneros-Heredia & McDiarmid, 2007). laurae ( Cisneros-Heredia & McDiarmid, 2007), N. Despite increasing efforts to better understand the diversity, natural history, ecology and distribution of glassfrogs in the tropical Andes, several species of Nymphargus remain known only from their type localities or few collected specimens ( e.g., Nymphargus buenaventura ( Cisneros-Heredia & Yánez-Muñoz, 2007 Yánez-Muñoz et al., 2014), N. Nymphargus Cisneros-Heredia & McDiarmid, 2007 currently includes 42 described species of glassfrogs (family Centrolenidae), and 21 of them occur in Ecuador ( Guayasamin et al., 2020 Frost, 2021). Rediscovery of Laura’s glassfrog Nymphargus laurae (Anura: Centrolenidae) with new data on its morphology, colouration, phylogenetic position and conservation in Ecuador. Cite this article Sánchez-Carvajal MJ, Reyes-Ortega GC, Cisneros-Heredia DF, Ortega-Andrade HM. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited. Licence This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. Morrone Subject Areas Biodiversity, Biogeography, Conservation Biology, Taxonomy, Zoology Keywords Phylogeny, Taxonomy, Glassfrogs, Colonso-Chalupas biological reserve, Systematics Copyright © 2021 Sánchez-Carvajal et al. 4 División de Herpetología, Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad, Quito, Pichincha, Ecuador DOI 10.7717/peerj.12644 Published Accepted Received Academic Editor Juan J.
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