Coffee agrosystems: an important refuge for amphibians in central Veracruz, Mexico

Of the most common types of land use, agroecosystems put enormous pressure on many groups of biological organisms. Amphibians are not the exception and here we show the value of these habitats to the conservation of this group. We evaluated the diversity of amphibians in coffee plantations (traditional and specialized shade) and also in fragments of cloud forest, the ecosystem that was dominant in pre-agricultural central Veracruz, Mexico. A sampling effort of 2,688 person hours recorded 1,078 amphibians belonging to 26 species, 10 families and three orders. Based on the mean complementarity of 64 %, the non-metric multidimensional scaling analysis identified three groups of communities indicating a high degree of species turnover. The Craugastoridae family was dominant at the study sites, representing 40 % of the entire sample. Amphibian diversity was high in cloud forest fragments, followed by the traditional coffee plantation. However, amphibian richness in the specialized shaded coffee plantation was not significantly different from that of the other two habitats. We conclude that the different types of coffee agrosystems are reservoirs for at least 46 % of the species native to cloud forest, indicating that this habitat is very important to the conservation of the amphibian fauna in central Veracruz.