Bird species richness in Western Paraná state and citizen science: first approach

Citizen science aids researchers by involving a considerable non-scientist contingent to accumulate large amounts of information. The Wiki Aves depository revolutionized the knowledge of species ranges within Brazil, and we used it to analyze the pattern of bird species richness in western Paraná state, southern Brazil. This region is composed of 50 municipalities. Of these, as of 16 Mat 2017, 92% have at least one record (1 to 311 ± 43.3), for a total of 408 species. Twenty-three municipalities have records of Atlantic Forest endemic species. The cities with the highest species richness are Foz do Iguaçu (311), Cascavel (273) and Toledo (162). We used the following municipality’s variables to verify their contributions to the observed species richness pattern: area, amount of remaining vegetation, percentage of remaining vegetation in relation to area, number of users registered in Wiki Aves, protected area, number of endemic Atlantic Forest species and presence or absence of protected areas. By using a log-likelihood ratio, we determined the model which explains species richness has inflation of zeros. We, then, fitted a zero-inflated negative binomial distribution regression model; we did not consider interaction among variables. We verified that, at the 95% level of confidence, protected area is not statistically significant to explain neither species richness nor the number of zeros. Percentage of remaining vegetation is not statistically significant to explain species richness. We conclude species richness patterns do not result from the presence of protected areas or amount of remaining vegetation of each municipality.