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Birds from Cáceres, Mato Grosso: the highest species richness ever recorded in a Brazilian non-forest region

Leonardo Esteves Lopes, João Batista de Pinho, Aldo Ortiz, Mahal Massavi Evangelista, Luís Fábio Silveira, Fabio Schunck, Pedro Ferreira Develey

Abstract


The municipality of Cáceres. Mato Grosso state, Brazil, lies in a contact zone between three semi-arid to arid ecoregions: the Chiquitano Dry Forests, the Cerrado and the Pantanal. In spite of being one of the best sampled non-forest sites for birds in Brazil, with thousands of specimens collected, no paper to date has ever compiled the information available for the region. In this paper, we present a checklist of the avifauna of Cáceres, gathering the historical data available together with our own unpublished observations during a series of expeditions to the region. During our fieldwork we recorded 374 species to the region. The analysis of literature data and museum specimens rises to 446 the number of species ever recorded in the municipality, 362 (81.2%) of which were documented with specimens. This is by far the highest bird species richness recorded for a non-forest site in Brazil. 


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