Expansion of the agricultural frontier in the largest South American Dry Forest: Identifying priority conservation areas for snakes before everything is lost.

MARÍA SOLEDAD ANDRADE-DÍAZ; SARQUIS JUAN ANDRES; BETTE LOISELLE; ALEJANDRO GIRAUDO; JUAN DIAZ-GOMEZ

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2019 vol. 1 p. 1 - 134

1932-6203

PONE-D-19-11849R1 Expansion of the agricultural frontier in the largest South American Dry Forest: Identifying priority conservation areas for snakes before everything is lost. Dear Dr. Andrade-Díaz:I am pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper at this point, to enable them to help maximize its impact. If they will be preparing press materials for this manuscript, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org.For any other questions or concerns, please email plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE.With kind regards,PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staffon behalf ofDr. Christopher Nice Academic EditorPLOS ONE__________________________________________________In compliance with data protection regulations, you may request that we remove your personal registration details at any time. (Use the following URL: https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/login.asp?a=r). Please contact the publication office if you have any questions.Conservation planning relies on integrating existing knowledge, social-environmental contexts, and potential threats to identify gaps and opportunities for action. Here we present a case study on how priority areas for conservation can be determined using existing information on biodiversity occurrence and threats. Specifically, our goals are: (1) to model the ecological niche of twelve endemic snake species in the Dry Chaco Forest, (2) to quantify the impact of the deforestation rates on their distributions, (3) to propose high priority areas for conservation in order to improve the actual protected area system, and (4) to evaluate the influence of the human footprint on the optimization of selected priority areas. Our results demonstrate that Argentinian Dry Chaco represent, on average, ~74% of the distribution of endemic snake species anddeforestation has reduced suitable areas of all snake species in the region. Further, the current protected areas are likely insufficient to conserve these species as only very low percentages (3.27%) of snakes? ranges occur within existing protected areas. Our models identified high priority areas in the north of the Chaco forest where continuous, well-conserved forest still exists. These high priority areas include transition zones within the foothill forest and areas that could connect patches of forest between the western and eastern Chaco forest. Our findings identify spatial priorities that minimize conflicts with human activities, a key issue for this biodiversity hotspot area. We argue that consultation with stakeholders and decision-makers are urgently needed in order to take concrete actions to protect the habitat, or we risk losing the best conservation opportunities to protect endemic snakes that inhabit the rgentinian Dry Chaco