Herpetological richness and diversity in an offshore archipelago of the Tropical Eastern Pacific

Some of the fundamental predictions of the theory of Island Biogeography establish that species richness will positively correlate with the island's area and inversely correlate with the distance from the nearest land mass. Coiba National Park (CNP) comprises an offshore archipelago of around 35 islands and islets of different areas off the coast of the Panama Pacific. This archipelago was once attached to the Mainland and separated from it around 12,000 ya, creating a barrier for further species colonization. In this study, the herpetological richness, diversity and community assemblages were assessed along four different islands of CNP. Amphibian richness was lower in the islands (maximum five spp.) compared to the mainland (11 spp.); meanwhile, reptile richness was similar between the mainland and Coiba island (21 spp.). Amphibian diversity was in the same order of magnitude among the mainland (H´= 1.18) and the islands of CNP (maximum H´=1.36), except for Canales de Afuera island, w..., Herpetological Surveys
Surveys were conducted between July 2019 and August 2023 along transects in 18 sites from the Mainland in front of CNP and on four islands of CNP archipelago (Figure 1). The islands surveyed included Canales de Afuera, Rancheria, Coiba, and Jicaron (Table 1). Several field trips occurred each year except for 2020 when only one site was visited (Table 1_SuppInfo).
Visual encounter surveys (VES) (Crump & Norman, 1994; Rodda et al., 2007) were used to identify metamorphic amphibians and terrestrial reptiles. VES was conducted along three to five randomly deployed 2 m wide and 100 m long transects at each site during day and night. Each transect was separated at least 20 m from each other, and two people constantly surveyed the transects. Search effort (in person-h) was calculated by multiplying the total search time at each site by the number of observers (Maritz & Alexander, 2012), excluding time allocated to manipulate captured individuals. Each transect wa..., , # Herpetological richness and diversity in an offshore archipelago of the Tropical Eastern Pacific

This README file was generated on 2024-08-02 by Eric E. Flores.

GENERAL INFORMATION
Title of Dataset: Data from: Herpetological richness and diversity in an offshore archipelago of the Tropical Eastern Pacific

1. Author Information
A. Principal Investigator Contact Information
Name: Eric E. Flores
Institution: Coiba Scientific Station (COIBA AIP)
Address: Gustavo Lara street, building 145B, City of Knowledge, Clayton, PO Box 0843-01853, Panama, Republic of Panama
2. Email: [[e-mail]](mailto:[e-mail])

B. Associate or Co-investigator

Contact Information

Name: NA

Institution: NA

Address: NA

Email: NA

3\. Date of data collection (single date, range, approximate date): 2019-2023
4\. Geographic location of data collection: Coiba National Park, Panama
5\. Information about funding sources that supported the collection of the data: Coiba Scientific Sta...