TY - JOUR
AU1 - Roll, Uri
AU2 - Feldman, Anat
AU3 - Novosolov, Maria
AU4 - Allison, Allen
AU5 - Bauer, Aaron
AU6 - Bernard, Rodolphe
AU7 - Böhm, Monika
AU8 - Castro-Herrera, Fernando
AU9 - Chirio, Laurent
AU1 - Collen, Ben
AU1 - Colli, Guarino
AU1 - Dabool, Lital
AU1 - Das, Indraneil
AU1 - Doan, Tiffany
AU1 - Grismer, Lee
AU1 - Hoogmoed, Marinus
AU1 - Itescu, Yuval
AU1 - Kraus, Fred
AU1 - LeBreton, Matthew
AU2 - Lewin, Amir
AU2 - Martins, Marcio
AU2 - Maza, Erez
AU2 - Meirte, Danny
AU2 - Nagy, Zoltán
AU2 - de C. Nogueira, Cristiano
AU2 - Pauwels, Olivier
AU2 - Pincheira-Donoso, Daniel
AU2 - Powney, Gary
AU2 - Sindaco, Roberto
AU3 - Tallowin, Oliver
AU3 - Torres-Carvajal, Omar
AU3 - Trape, Jean-François
AU3 - Vidan, Enav
AU3 - Uetz, Peter
AU3 - Wagner, Philipp
AU3 - Wang, Yuezhao
AU3 - Orme, C.
AU3 - Grenyer, Richard
AU3 - Meiri, Shai
AB - The distributions of amphibians, birds and mammals have underpinned global and local conservation priorities, and have been fundamental to our understanding of the determinants of global biodiversity. In contrast, the global distributions of reptiles, representing a third of terrestrial vertebrate diversity, have been unavailable. This prevented the incorporation of reptiles into conservation planning and biased our understanding of the underlying processes governing global vertebrate biodiversity. Here, we present and analyse the global distribution of 10,064 reptile species (99% of extant terrestrial species). We show that richness patterns of the other three tetrapod classes are good spatial surrogates for species richness of all reptiles combined and of snakes, but characterize diversity patterns of lizards and turtles poorly. Hotspots of total and endemic lizard richness overlap very little with those of other taxa. Moreover, existing protected areas, sites of biodiversity significance and global conservation schemes represent birds and mammals better than reptiles. We show that additional conservation actions are needed to effectively protect reptiles, particularly lizards and turtles. Adding reptile knowledge to a global complementarity conservation priority scheme identifies many locations that consequently become important. Notably, investing resources in some of the world’s arid, grassland and savannah habitats might be necessary to represent all terrestrial vertebrates efficiently.
TI - The global distribution of tetrapods reveals a need for targeted reptile conservation
JF - Nature Ecology & Evolution
DO - 10.1038/s41559-017-0332-2
DA - 2017-10-09
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/springer-journals/the-global-distribution-of-tetrapods-reveals-a-need-for-targeted-XPruczLvQn
SP - 1677
EP - 1682
VL - 1
IS - 11
DP - DeepDyve
ER -