New records of Lithodytes lineatus (Anura: Leptodactylidae) in the Cerrado-Amazon transition

Lithodytes lineatus is widely distributed in the Amazon and currently found in the Cerrado domain. We document two new records of the species in the transition zone of Amazon-Cerrado located in the state of Tocantins, Brazil. These records extend the geographic distribution of this species and help to fill infor mation gaps in the state of Tocantins, Brazil.

Here we provide new distribution records for L. lineatus in the Tocantins state, northern Brazil (Fig. 1).We obtained the new records during herpetofaunal studies in the Araguaia-Tocantins hydrographic basin, a transitional area between Amazonia and Cerrado.We captured individuals of L. lineatus (Fig. 2) using pitfall traps (collecting permit issued by IBAMA: 63228-1), and deposited the specimens in the Coleção Zoológica da Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso do Sul, Campo Grande municipality, Mato Grosso do Sul state, Brazil.To create the distribution map, we use the ecoregions shapefile from World Wild Life -WWF (Olson et al. 2001) modified to display the Brazilian domains highlighting the Ecoregion "Mato Grosso tropical dry forests" usually named as "Cerrado-Amazon ecotone" (e.g.Bezerra et al. 2009, Cintra et al. 2014).We used the International Union for Conservation of Nature -IUCN spatial data with the proposed L. lineatus distribution (La Marca et al. c2010).Then, we added literature records from Tocantins (Pavan 2007, Cintra et al. 2014 and present study), Maranhão (Freitas et al. 2014) and Pará state (Bernardo et al. 2012).There is no information about Lithodytes lineatus type locality; thus, we expanded its distribution based on the nearest known locality for the species. In

AUTHOR´S CONTRIBUTION
RT, HF and RMF significant contribution in conception and design of the study, data acquisition, and writing of the manuscript; LAS significant contribution in data acquisition and critical review adding intellectual content; SM and DJS significant contribution and critical review adding intellectual content.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST
The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest ACKNOWLEDGMENTS RT thanks to Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico -CNPq for the master fellowship (133289/2019-2).RMF thanks to Comitê de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior -CAPES for the master fellowship (financing code 001).LAS thanks to CNPq for the doctoral fellowship (140408/2018-5).SM thanks to CAPES for the postdoctoral fellowship and DJS thanks to CNPq (311492/2017-7).

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Distribution map of Lithodytes lineatus in South America.Colors on map represent Domains and Ecoregions from South America (modified from Olson et al. 2001).Striped area indicates the distribution suggested for the species by International Union for Conservation of Nature -IUCN (La Marca et al. c2010).White circles indicate literature records which were not included in the distribution indicated by IUCN, and black circles indicate the new records in Tocantins state, Brazil (1: Araguaína and 2: Caseara).

(
9°24'25.36'' South; 49°58'21.33''West).The records of L. lineatus to the Caseara municipality extend its distribution in approximately 280 km south-west from the previously southernmost locality in the state, reported from Palmeirantes municipality(Pavan 2007) (Fig.1).The data presented here on the geographic range of L. lineatus south into the Cerrado show that this species does not occur exclusively in the Amazon domain, reaching transitional areas and forest habitats in the Brazilian Cerrado.This result reinforces the species structure demonstrated byValdujo et al. (2012) that Amazonian species of marginal occurrence in the Cerrado are concentrated in the western and northern of this domain.Despite harboring a unique anuran species composition comprised of species typical to the Cerrado and neighboring domains (Amazonia and Caatinga; Silvano et al. 2016), the Brazilian state of Tocantins still has many gaps of knowledge related to biodiversity and distribution patterns of anurans (Diniz-Filho et al. 2005).Additional sampling effort and new records will help to fill these gaps and improve strategies for conservation of biodiversity in this anuran species-rich region of northern Brazil.