An integrative analysis uncovers a new, pseudo-cryptic species of Amazonian marmoset (Primates: Callitrichidae: Mico) from the arc of deforestation.

Amazonia has the richest primate fauna in the world. Nonetheless, the diversity and distribution of Amazonian primates remain little known and the scarcity of baseline data challenges their conservation. These challenges are especially acute in the Amazonian arc of deforestation, the 2500 km long southern edge of the Amazonian biome that is rapidly being deforested and converted to agricultural and pastoral landscapes. Amazonian marmosets of the genus Mico are little known endemics of this region and therefore a priority for research and conservation efforts. However, even nascent conservation efforts are hampered by taxonomic uncertainties in this group, such as the existence of a potentially new species from the Juruena-Teles Pires interfluve hidden within the M. emiliae epithet. Here we test if these marmosets belong to a distinct species using new morphological, phylogenomic, and geographic distribution data analysed within an integrative taxonomic framework. We discovered a new, pseudo-cryptic Mico species hidden within the epithet M. emiliae, here described and named after Horacio Schneider, the pioneer of molecular phylogenetics of Neotropical primates. We also clarify the distribution, evolutionary and morphological relationships of four other Mico species, bridging Linnean, Wallacean, and Darwinian shortfalls in the conservation of primates in the Amazonian arc of deforestation.

ATLANTIC-PRIMATES: a dataset of communities and occurrences of primates in the Atlantic Forests of South America.

Primates play an important role in ecosystem functioning and offer critical insights into human evolution, biology, behavior, and emerging infectious diseases. There are 26 primate species in the Atlantic Forests of South America, 19 of them endemic. We compiled a dataset of 5,472 georeferenced locations of 26 native and 1 introduced primate species, as hybrids in the genera Callithrix and Alouatta. The dataset includes 700 primate communities, 8,121 single species occurrences and 714 estimates of primate population sizes, covering most natural forest types of the tropical and subtropical Atlantic Forest of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina and some other biomes. On average, primate communities of the Atlantic Forest harbor 2 ± 1 species (range = 1-6). However, about 40% of primate communities contain only one species. Alouatta guariba (N = 2,188 records) and Sapajus nigritus (N = 1,127) were the species with the most records. Callicebus barbarabrownae (N = 35), Leontopithecus caissara (N = 38), and Sapajus libidinosus (N = 41) were the species with the least records. Recorded primate densities varied from 0.004 individuals/km2 (Alouatta guariba at Fragmento do Bugre, Paraná, Brazil) to 400 individuals/km2 (Alouatta caraya in Santiago, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil). Our dataset reflects disparity between the numerous primate census conducted in the Atlantic Forest, in contrast to the scarcity of estimates of population sizes and densities. With these data, researchers can develop different macroecological and regional level studies, focusing on communities, populations, species co-occurrence and distribution patterns. Moreover, the data can also be used to assess the consequences of fragmentation, defaunation, and disease outbreaks on different ecological processes, such as trophic cascades, species invasion or extinction, and community dynamics. There are no copyright restrictions. Please cite this Data Paper when the data are used in publications. We also request that researchers and teachers inform us of how they are using the data.

Pervasive defaunation of forest remnants in a tropical biodiversity hotspot.

Tropical deforestation and forest fragmentation are among the most important biodiversity conservation issues worldwide, yet local extinctions of millions of animal and plant populations stranded in unprotected forest remnants remain poorly explained. Here, we report unprecedented rates of local extinctions of medium to large-bodied mammals in one of the world's most important tropical biodiversity hotspots. We scrutinized 8,846 person-years of local knowledge to derive patch occupancy data for 18 mammal species within 196 forest patches across a 252,669-km(2) study region of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. We uncovered a staggering rate of local extinctions in the mammal fauna, with only 767 from a possible 3,528 populations still persisting. On average, forest patches retained 3.9 out of 18 potential species occupancies, and geographic ranges had contracted to 0-14.4% of their former distributions, including five large-bodied species that had been extirpated at a regional scale. Forest fragments were highly accessible to hunters and exposed to edge effects and fires, thereby severely diminishing the predictive power of species-area relationships, with the power model explaining only ~9% of the variation in species richness per patch. Hence, conventional species-area curves provided over-optimistic estimates of species persistence in that most forest fragments had lost species at a much faster rate than predicted by habitat loss alone.