Abstract
The Neotropical region can be defined as Central America south of the Mexican highlands and South America to the La Plata estuary in northern Argentina (Albert et al. 2011); some authors exclude from the region the arid Pacific slopes of Peru and northern Chile. The Neotropical region exhibits high levels of species-level biodiversity in many taxa, including plants in general (Weber 1969), cacti (Buxbaum 1969), and the fauna generally (Fittkau 1969), including arachnids (Bucherl 1969) and mammals (Simpson 1969). The region is unsurpassed for the diversity of insects (Illies 1969; Kuschel 1969), mollusks (Jaeckel 1969), birds (Olrog 1969), and of particular interest in this volume, fishes (Gery 1969; Hubert and Renno 2006). The Neotropical freshwater fish fauna is the most diverse in the world, with around 3,600 freshwater fish species according to Reis (2003), and 4,164 according to Froese and Pauly (2016). Much of the available information on Neotropical fish biodiversity has been summarized by Malabarba et al. (1998). Vari and Malabarba (1998) noted that ~800 new freshwater species have been described during the last two decades from South America, and they anticipated an increase in the rate of description and a final total of some 8,000 Neotropical fish species.
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Hilsdorf, A.W.S., Hallerman, E.M. (2017). Introduction. In: Genetic Resources of Neotropical Fishes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-55838-7_1
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