We all met each other sharing the personal interest of studying anuran communities from Southeastern Brazil, specifically, anurans from the northwestern region of the São Paulo State, Brazil. The institution was the campus of São José do Rio Preto of the São Paulo State University (UNESP, SP, Brazil), where our supervisor was Prof. Dr. Denise de Cerqueira Rossa-Feres. Some of us (TSV and VHMP) started earlier during our scientific initiation projects required for our graduation in the course of Biological Sciences, whereas the three of us (DBP, FRdS, and TGdS) arrived later in the Laboratory of Theoretical Ecology of the UNESP for the master’s degree in Animal Biology of the same institution. Though strongly focused on field ecology of anuran communities, the experience in the laboratory led by Dr. Rossa-Feres allowed us a working environment and stimulation for everyone to explore community ecology in its broadest senses: local to broad-scales, natural history to statistically-designed approaches. Dr. Rossa-Feres guided us during the early steps of our scientific careers, and, besides all benefits from the professional experiences, we also built strong friendship among one other. All that said, we want to dedicate this book to Prof. Dr. Denise Rossa-Feres, our common supervisor and example of dedication in scientific life.

Despite our strong background on community ecology focused on anuran distributions at local scales (ie, breeding ponds), biogeography is a discipline that has called our attention since our early days in science (early 2000s). While studying the classical references of William E. Duellman, one of them served us to better understand the patterns of anuran distribution in Southeastern Brazil, the book chapter “Distribution Patterns of Amphibians in South America”(published in 1999 by the John Hopkins University Press). By the mid-2016, we realized that a plenty of biogeographical studies considering anurans in South America were performed since 1999, but a systematic quantification of how many species are documented in South America was missing. Moreover, we realized that we could perform different analyses to quantify and map different biological diversity metrics that were never or seldom explored in the literature so far. Then, we planned to update the anuran species list in South America and, based on our different expertise, split the major biogeographic themes so that each one of us could contribute chapters of this book.