Vol. 4 No. 2 Jul-Dic (2014)

The journal Biodiversidad Neotropical celebrates its fourth year of activities with the edition of four volumes and eight numbers. Every day our project is more consolidated. In this number, we are glad to inform the scientific community about the inclusion of Biodiversidad Neotropical in the open access platform of electronic Latin American and Spanish scientific journals «e-revist@s». In order to provide more visibility to our contributors, we have applied to other index systems, and it is our goal to have the journal subscribed in many of them in the near future.

This number includes ten scientific articles, and that will be the minimum number of contributions we expect to have every semester. Continuing with our labor of documenting the biodiversity of the region, for this number we have the report of new records of species in the genus Pristimantis (Anura: Craugastoridae) for the northeastern portion of Colombia. It is important to mention that these species are threat by habitat fragmentation and are affected by the infection with the fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidi at the reported localities in the Colombian department of Santander. On the same line of ideas, we report the first records of the long tail weasel Mustela frenata (Carnivora: Mustelidae) for the department of Quindío, in the Central Andes of Colombia; records that are accompanied by analyses on the conservation status of this carnivore

in the country, as well as comments on the importance of this finding in the context of the local knowledge of the species.

In this number our audience will find two population studies: 1) for Colombian population of Atelopus spurrelli at the PNN Utria, and 2) for the pimpano turtle (Chelydra acutirostris Peters 1862) (Chelydridae) at the Cajones and Los Coclí streams, at the Colombian department of Quindío.

Conservation is also represented in this number with three interesting studies at different scales: 1) a study on introduced plants in the wetlands and lakes of an area with a potential of adventure tourism; 2) the effect of human activity on the composition of aquatic macroinverteebrates; 3) the introduction of a regional conservation strategy for jaguar (Panthera onca).

Computational tools are applied to the understanding of Superficial Sea Pressure and Temperature on the climate variation in Colombia; and finally, biotechnology is represented in this number by a study on results on in vitro clonal propagation and rooting for pineapple (Ananas comosus).

We hope the information contained in this number will contribute to strength the research on tropical biology and conservation in our region.

Alex Mauricio Jiménez-Ortega

Editor