Database of amphibian vouchers and records available at the Kerala Agricultural University Natural History Museum in Thrissur and an updated checklist of amphibians of Kerala, India

The amphibian database of the Centre for Wildlife Studies of Kerala Agricultural University has the data that are either available as voucher specimens with the Kerala Agricultural University Natural History Museum (KAUNHM) or as photo vouchers and other opportunistic records from Kerala part of the southern Western Ghats between 2008 and 2020. This repository holds information on 91 species of amphibians belonging to 10 families, of which 87% are endemic to the Western Ghats and 34% are classified under the IUCN Red List threatened categories.  This study highlights the significance of such digital databases that can serve as an immense source of regional biodiversity data, and therefore, biodiversity monitoring and conservation. 


INTRODUCTION
Among the vertebrates in the world, amphibians are the most threatened taxa and have the highest proportion of species on the verge of extinction (Baillie et al. 2004;Roelants et al. 2007). The Western Ghats is considered as one of the amphibian hotspots of India (Dutta 1997;Dubois 1999;Biju 2001). The part of the southern Western Ghats within the political boundary of Kerala is exceptionally rich in amphibian diversity due to various favorable climatic and edaphic factors and the unique distribution of diverse vegetation communities and habitats. Biju (2001), after his seven-year fieldwork, published an eye-opening article that indicated the presence of several unidentified anuran amphibian species from the Western Ghats. This was one of the primary evidence for the untapped and unexplored biological wealth of a megadiverse country. The latest publication is by Das (2015) which enlisted 151 species of amphibians from Kerala. Since then, within a span of five years, 30 new species have been added to the checklist of amphibians of Kerala (Abraham et al. 2015;Dinesh et al. 2015;Howlader et al. 2015;Dahanukar et al. 2016;Krutha et al. 2017;Joshy et al. 2009;Vijayakumar et al. 2019). This trend indicates that more novelties among the amphibians are yet to be known from Kerala, as are from other parts of the Western Ghats. Besides that, amphibian data suffer from biases due to the inconspicuous nature, unique biology & ecology of several species and the challenges in undertaking field studies in the forests at odd hours. According to Nameer et al. (2015), 33% of the amphibians belong to various threatened categories of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Hence, documentation of amphibians is extremely important to win the Linnean shortfall which is considered as a basic flaw in biodiversity data (Hortal et al. 2015;Ficetola et al. 2019).
Most of the amphibian documentation in Kerala were primarily focussed within the protected area networks. However, the studies on amphibians by Murali & Raman (2012), Rathod & Rathod (2013), Syamili & Nameer (2018), and Afthab et al. (2018) highlighted the importance of human-modified landscapes within or adjacent to the Western Ghats mountains in amphibian conservation. Therefore, to bridge this Wallacean shortfall in amphibians the role of professionally maintained natural history museum collections (Melber & Abraham 2002;Winker 2004) and photo vouchers from both protected areas and human-modified landscapes are crucial. Though the national natural history museum collections are well known to the scientific world, the works by Ganesh et al. (2020) and Zacharias & Jose (2020) throw light on the significance of hidden local natural history museum collections on herpetofauna.
The Centre for Wildlife Studies of Kerala Agricultural University (KAU) has been documenting the biodiversity of the southern Western Ghats over the past three decades. This work by Centre for Wildlife Studies underlines the contemporary relevance of local natural history museum collections and photo vouchers in this digital era which can act as an important source of information on the taxa in question.

Study Area
The amphibians have been documented from 46 different sites extended over 11 districts in Kerala. Besides human-dominated landscapes such as Kole Wetlands which is a Ramsar Site, educational institute campuses, and homegardens, data were also collected from tiger reserves (2 out of 2), wildlife sanctuaries (9/17), national parks (2/5), biological reserves (1/2), and reserve forests of Kerala, south India. The percentage of amphibian observations from respective geographic locations are represented as a heatmap (Figure 1).

METHODS
The documentation of amphibians by the Centre for Wildlife Studies commenced in 2008 and is continuing till date. There are three types of observations recorded in the amphibian database of KAUNHM: (i)voucher specimens are wet preserved in 70% alcohol, (ii) amphibian photo-vouchers from within and outside the protected areas/reserve forests of Kerala, and (iii) opportunistic records of amphibians from across the state. The respective museum registration number of voucher specimens, images of photo vouchers, and opportunistic observations are entered into a digital database along with species taxonomy, habitat, GPS data, observer's/collector's name, and date of observation ( Table 2). The amphibians were identified with the help of the standard references such as Biju & Bossuyt (2009), Biju et al. (2011, Dinesh et al. (2015), Dahanukar et al. (2016), Garg & Biju (2016), and . The taxonomy and nomenclature used in this paper follows Frost (2020).

RESULTS
The amphibian database of the Kerala Agricultural University Natural Histiry Museum (KAUNHM) has information on 91 species which is around 50.3% of amphibians of Kerala, of which 79 species are endemic to the Western Ghats and 31 species come under various threatened categories of IUCN (Table 1). The KAUNHM has voucher specimens for 23% of amphibian species of Kerala (Table 1).
Among the 328 observations in the database 40% is voucher specimens followed by photo vouchers (36%) and opportunistic records (24%) ( Table 2). Most of the observation is from the Palakkad District (35%) followed by Thrissur (28%) (Figure 1). Out of the 11 families of amphibians known from Kerala, KAUNHM has voucher specimens for the species belonging to nine families. The highest number of observations is from the family Rhacophoridae followed by the family Nyctibatrachidae ( Figure 2). The only family for which we do not have information is Indotyphlyidae.
Out of the 30 genera of the amphibians seen in Kerala, we have information on the 23 genera (76.7%) (Table 3). Even though there are records of both orders Anura and Gymnophiona, 99% of the data deals with anurans. There is a lacuna in Gymnophiona observations since we have not conducted any systematic study on caecilians by taking into consideration its cryptic behaviour (Table 3).
The images of photo voucher specimens are attached as Appendix I and an updated checklist of amphibians of Kerala are attached as Appendix II.

CONCLUSION
The amphibian database of the Kerala Agricultural University Natural History Museum (KAUNHM), Thrissur, Kerala, southern India which is an eclectic mix of museum collections, photo vouchers, and opportunistic records from the protected areas, reserved forests, wetlands and human-modified landscapes. This database can serve as an immense source of regional biodiversity information and thus be useful in various ways including the IUCN Red Listing process. We also present here an updated checklist of the amphibians of Kerala. www.threatenedtaxa.org

J TT
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