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Las abejas y otros polinizadores se enfrentan a una grave amenaza de supervivencia debido a una serie de factores de alcance regional y mundial. Para diseñar estrategias de conservación exitosas, es necesario evaluar el interés de las personas y el nivel de apoyo a la apicultura. Nuestro objetivo fue analizar la percepción de la sociedad sobre la apicultura en una franja de cinco municipios de la zona centro de Veracruz, México. Se emplearon encuestas semiestructuradas con un muestreo aleatorio en cada uno de los municipios con actividad apícola. Los datos cualitativos se analizaron empleando un análisis de contenido contrastivo codificado, y los cuantitativos con estadística inferencial. Se encuestó a un total de 282 personas, de las cuales se encontró que el 89% tiene una percepción positiva de la apicultura, debido a los beneficios para la salud del consumo de miel y los efectos ambientales positivos de la polinización. Sin embargo, el nivel de sus expectativas, interés, experiencia, actitudes y sentimientos no era muy alto, ni sus tendencias de comportamiento eran conducentes a la conservación. El 52% de los encuestados veía la apicultura como “algo” vagamente relacionado con el medio ambiente, el 48% la relacionaba con la salud, el 43% con la nutrición, el 39% con la cultura, el 37% con la economía y el 20% con la educación. Las personas entre 19 y 25 años de edad de los municipios de Xico y Coatepec mostraron el mayor interés por la apicultura. Concluimos que una estrategia de concientización es indispensable para la preservación de la actividad, enfatizando el papel clave de la apicultura en la conservación del medio ambiente y los beneficios sociales tangibles que ofrece.

English abstract: The abuse of inorganic fertilizers in coffee agroecosystems is a worldwide problem. In central Mexico, organic fertilizers are being introduced as an alternative way to restore soil fertility. The aim of this study was to investigate coffee farmers from central Veracruz’s perceptions of bat guano as organic fertilizer. Surveys were conducted with closed and open questions followed by quantitative and qualitative analysis. Eighty-eight percent of the farmers surveyed negatively perceived bat guano. Factors influencing this perception were bats’ physical appearance, their role as disease transmitters, and the difficulties in procuring guano, including the resources needed to extract it, handle it, and transport it safely to their workplaces.Spanish abstract: El abuso de fertilizantes inorgánicos en los agroecosistemas del café es un problema mundial. En el centro de México se comienzan a emplear fertilizantes orgánicos como alternativa para restaurar los suelos. El objetivo de este estudio fue investigar la percepción de los caficultores sobre el empleo del guano de murciélago como fertilizante. Se realizaron encuestas con preguntas abiertas y cerradas que se analizaron cuantitativa y cualtitativamente. El ochenta y ocho por ciento de los cafeticultores encuestados percibieron negativamente al guano de murciélago. Los factores que influyeron en esta percepción fueron: la apariencia física de los murciélagos, su rol como transmisores de enfermedades y las dificultades para adquirir el guano, incluyendo los recursos necesarios para extraerlo, manipularlo y transportarlo de manera segura a sus fincas cafetaleras.French abstract: L’abus d’engrais inorganiques dans les agroécosystèmes de café est un problème mondial. Dans le centre du Mexique, les engrais biologiques commencent à être utilisés pour restaurer les sols. Notre recherche se proposait d’étudier la perception de l’utilisation du guano de chauve-souris comme engrais organique par les caféiculteurs. Des enquêtes semi-structurées (comprenant des questions ouvertes et fermées) ont été menées à partir de méthodes quantitatives et qualitatives. Quatrevingt-huit pour cent des agriculteurs interrogés perçoivent ce guano de manière négative. Parmi les facteurs qui influencent cette perception se trouvent l’apparence physique des chauves-souris, la transmission de maladies et les difficultés pour acquérir le guano, y compris les ressources nécessaires pour l’extraire, le manipuler et le transporter en toute sécurité vers leurs exploitations.

As a governmental function, development for progress and welfare is a highly complex process that involves updating various attributes (such as a paradigm, critical or alternative, depending on of the way in which they are articulated regarding social aspects, environmental, and economic growth, as well as the institutional capacity of public and private actors). Regarding this, we are interested in the municipal institutional capacity (MIC) as a skill to carry out the functions and appropriate tasks that municipalities must fulfill in an effective, efficient, and sustainable way, and it varies considerably, depending on each local context. In order to analyze the relevance of the current official regionalization as a state government strategy for the centralized construction of MIC, an exploratory approach to its spatial behavior in the State of Veracruz, Mexico, was carried out. Given the nature of the study, a purely mixed approach, sequential exploratory design, subnational analysis methodology, and exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) were employed. The variable to be analyzed is the 2016 Municipal Functional Capacities Index (Índice de Capacidades Funcionales Municipales (ICFM)), with the Geostatistics Framework cartographic base of the 2020 Population and Housing Census. The analysis units are 212 municipalities in the 2014–2017 government period. As a result, it was confirmed that the current regionalization was irrelevant, owing to the absence of global spatial autocorrelation, and it was concluded that targeted interventions are necessary according to regional modeling techniques, based on scientific evidence.

Anuran conservation is paramount, as frogs represent a group of vertebrates that is highly threatened by various anthropogenic and environmental factors. Habitat management decisions must therefore be made considering the interactions between amphibians and their microhabitats. We determined the resting microhabitats of an endemic arboreal male frog, considering biotic and abiotic variables in tropical montane forest fragments and shaded coffee agroecosystems in Central Veracruz, Mexico. In a sampling effort undertaken by 580 person-hours, covering 1100 ha, 157 male small-eared treefrogs, Rheohyla miotympanum (Cope, 1863), were recorded resting in 29 plant species. Using coinertia analysis, the resting microhabitats were shown to mainly consist of five herbaceous and shrub species. Post hoc analysis showed that the significant relationship with the resting microhabitats was explained by the importance of the presence of plant species that grow at higher elevations, enabling low frog body temperatu...

Bat acoustic libraries are important tools that assemble echolocation calls to allow the comparison and discrimination to confirm species identifications. The Sonozotz project represents the first nation‐wide library of bat echolocation calls for a megadiverse country. It was assembled following a standardized recording protocol that aimed to cover different recording habitats, recording techniques, and call variation inherent to individuals. The Sonozotz project included 69 species of echolocating bats, a high species richness that represents 50% of bat species found in the country. We include recommendations on how the database can be used and how the sampling methods can be potentially replicated in countries with similar environmental and geographic conditions. To our knowledge, this represents the most exhaustive effort to date to document and compile the diversity of bat echolocation calls for a megadiverse country. This database will be useful to address a range of ecological questions including the effects of anthropogenic activities on bat communities through the analysis of bat sound., The Sonozotz project represents the first nation‐wide library of bat echolocation calls for a megadiverse country.

The chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (Bd) is a threat to the survival of amphibians worldwide, a situation that is compounded by several other factors. In this study, we determined the prevalence of Bd and its relationship to biotic and abiotic variables for six amphibian communities in two cloud forest fragments and four coffee agroecosystems in central Veracruz, Mexico. A sampling effort of 768 person-hours and 109 skin swabs resulted in the detection of B. dendrobatidis in four amphibian species belonging to three families. The co-inertia model showed the following as the most important variables: tree density, fern species, temperature and elevation, fragment or site size, and structural index. Conversely, we did not find a clear relationship between Bd prevalence and the habitat management gradient. The highest prevalence was found in the second cloud forest, but a very similar result was found in one of the traditional agroecosystems; the lowest levels of prevalence were found in another second traditional agroecosystem and the first cloud forest. The degree of infection was highest in the cloud forests where the diversity of trees, orchids, and elevation was higher. Ecnomiohyla miotympanum was the most abundant species and was found to be infected in four of the five sites, presenting the highest degree of infection.

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.

We describe a new species of Pseudoeurycea from the cloud forests of Huatusco in the state of Veracruz, México. This species belongs to the P. cephalica complex. Pseudoeurycea cafetalera sp. nov. is sister to the clade formed by P. cephalica and P. quetzalanensis. The new species is diagnosed by a stout body, long stout legs, short digits, somewhat webbed hands and feet, a distinctive coloration and by divergent mitochondrial DNA sequences.

This study investigated geographic variation in a suite of reproductive behavioral traits in Hyalinobatrachium fleischmanni across several sites in Mexico and Ecuador. We made observations on the frequency of egg-mass brooding behavior and compared brooding encounter rates between wet and dry forest types. Brooding encounter rates were significantly higher in the drier region, suggesting a potential relationship between paternal care and climatic conditions. We also compared calling and oviposition sites between geographic regions and tested for associations with the distributional range of the frog-eating bat, Trachops cirrhosus. In regions where H. fleischmanni and T. cirrhosus co-occur, both calling males and egg masses were more frequently found on ‘less exposed’ lower surfaces of leaves, where risk of attack from aerial predators may be reduced. We also provide novel information on brooding behavior and clutch guarding, and discuss the implications of our results in the framework of existin...

Context The processes of fragmentation, habitat loss, degradation and their combined effects are formidable threats to amphibian populations. Aims We evaluate the effect of three land use-type variables and nine landscape matrix quality factors on amphibian presence in four coffee agro-ecosystems and two cloud-forest fragments in central Veracruz, Mexico. Methods Each site was thoroughly searched using the visual-encounter survey technique along different trails in the most feasible microhabitats for detecting amphibians during four rainy seasons (2005, 2006, 2008 and 2009). Centred on the location where each amphibian species was first recorded, we established what we refer to as a buffer area within a radius of 1.5 km. A Co-Inertia mathematical model was used to determine which of the explanatory variables contributed to maintaining amphibian diversity. The landscape variables were landscape-quality index, open areas, canopy cover (low, intermediate, dense) at the matrix level, river, road and human population density and site size. Local variables were elevation, plant-structure and biological-impact indices. Key results During the study we recorded 1078 amphibians belonging to 26 species, 17 genera and 10 families. The variables explaining the composition of amphibian diversity were river and human population density, low canopy cover at the matrix level, elevation, site size and plant-structure index. Amphibian diversity increased as the structural complexity of the habitat increased, and the former was positively correlated with fragment size. Conclusion The present study indicated that coffee agro-ecosystems and the cloud-forest fragments in the region form a gradient in habitat quality and landscape variables that exert a differential influence on amphibian assemblages, and that each species responds uniquely to different variables. Implications Coffee agro-ecosystems and forest fragments cannot be seen as homogenous patches with a certain habitat quality, separate from the landscape matrix in which they are immersed. Stakeholders are not advised to rely on a single strategy to conserve the amphibian community, but rather should aim to maintain a heterogeneous landscape with forest fragments and coffee agro-ecosystems that have a complex vertical plant structure at the habitat level, especially in highly river-dense landscapes.