Traditionally, biodiversity conservation gap analyses have been focused on governmental protected areas (PAs). However, an increasing number of social initiatives in conservation (SICs) are promoting a new perspective for analysis. SICs include all of the efforts that society implements to conserve biodiversity, such as land protection, from private reserves to community zoning plans some of which have generated community-protected areas. This is the first attempt to analyze the status of conservation in Latin America when some of these social initiatives are included. The analyses were focused on amphibians because they are one of the most threatened groups worldwide. Mexico is not an exception, where more than 60% of its amphibians are endemic. We used a niche model approach to map the potential and real geographical distribution (extracting the transformed areas) of the endemic amphibians. Based on remnant distribution, all the species have suffered some degree of loss, but 36 species have lost more than 50% of their potential distribution. For 50 micro-endemic species we could not model their potential distribution range due to the small number of records per species, therefore the analyses were performed using these records directly. We then evaluated the efficiency of the existing set of governmental protected areas and established the contribution of social initiatives (private and community) for land protection for amphibian conservation. We found that most of the species have some proportion of their potential ecological niche distribution protected, but 20% are not protected at all within governmental PAs. 73% of endemic and 26% of micro-endemic amphibians are represented within SICs. However, 30 micro-endemic species are not represented within either governmental PAs or SICs. This study shows how the role of land conservation through social initiatives is therefore becoming a crucial element for an important number of species not protected by governmental PAs.

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Patterns of diversity are scale dependent and beta-diversity is not the exception. Mexico is megadiverse due to its high beta diversity, but little is known if it is scale-dependent and/or taxonomic-dependent. We explored these questions based on the self-similarity hypothesis of beta-diversity across spatial scales. Using geographic distribution ranges of 2 513 species, we compared the beta-diversity patterns of 4 groups of terrestrial vertebrates, across 7 spatial scales (from ~10 km 2 to 160 000 km 2 ), within 5 different (historically and environmentally) regions in Mexico: Northwest, Northeast, Centre, Southeast and the Yucatán Peninsula. We found that beta-diversity: 1) was not selfsimilar along the range of scales, being larger than expected according to the null model at coarse scale, and lower, but not significantly different, to expected at intermediate and fine scales; 2) varied across spatial scales, depending on the taxonomic group and on the region; 3) was higher at coarser scales; 4) was highest in the Centre and Southeast regions, and lowest in the Yucatán Peninsula, and 5) was higher for amphibians and reptiles than mammals and birds. As a consequence, beta-diversity of each group contributes differentially to the megadiversity of Mexico, likely due to a variation in the biogeographical histories and the perception of each group to environmental heterogeneity. These results show the importance of identify the appropriate geographical scale for biodiversity conservation analyses, such as for example, the analysis of complementarity.