An analysis of the inter-state similarity of the herpetofaunas of Mexican states

Abstract

Mexico is a megadiverse country with high amphibian and reptile richness. Understanding how Mexico’s herpetofauna is shared among Mexican states can contribute to developing conservation plans by figuring out which states may need to coordinate conservation actions. We generated species lists for the herpetofauna for all Mexican states, and used hierarchical clustering analyses to identify clusters of states on the basis of amphibian and reptile species separately. We also calculated pair-wise Jaccard distances for all Mexican states for amphibians, reptiles, and physiographic provinces and estimated the length of shared borders between states and the geographic (straight-line) distance between the centroids of pairs of states. We used these data to explore potential drivers of the cluster analysis results. Our cluster analysis for amphibians identified five clusters with nine subclusters, and for reptiles, resulted in four clusters with six subclusters. In general, the clusters for Mexican amphibians and reptiles have a similar composition of states. However, for amphibians, the states of Veracruz and Puebla form a cluster separate from a large cluster of northeastern Mexican states, whereas in reptiles Veracruz and Puebla cluster with northeastern Mexican states. Jaccard distances of amphibians and reptiles were highly, positively correlated. Both amphibian and reptile Jaccard distances were positively correlated with the physiographic provinces’ Jaccard distance and shared border length and negatively correlated with the distance between centroids. Taken together, our results suggest that the pattern of the sharing of herpetofaunal species among Mexican states is a consequence of the states’ proximity. Such a pattern is consistent with the underlying driver being the similarity of physiographic provinces (i.e., habitats and ecosystems) of these states (i.e., geographic proximity likely reflects, at least in large part, ecological similarity). Our results suggest clusters of states that should coordinate the conservation and management of their herpetofaunas. For example, clusters of states in southern Mexico share a high number of threatened amphibian species and clusters of states in northern Mexico share a high number of threatened reptile species. Oaxaca is also a state that has a unique herpetofauna and a high number of threatened species of both amphibians and reptiles.