INIBIOMA   20415
INSTITUTO DE INVESTIGACIONES EN BIODIVERSIDAD Y MEDIOAMBIENTE
Unidad Ejecutora - UE
artículos
Título:
The Conservation Status of the World?s Reptiles
Autor/es:
BOHM M; COLLEN B; BAILLE J; CHANSON J; COX N; RAM M; CRUZ F; DALTREY J
Revista:
BIOLOGICAL CONSERVATION
Editorial:
ELSEVIER SCI LTD
Referencias:
Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2013 vol. 157 p. 372 - 385
ISSN:
0006-3207
Resumen:
Effective and targeted conservation action requires detailed information about species,their distribution, systematics, and ecology and the distribution of threat processeswhich affect them. Knowledge of reptilian diversity remains surprisingly disparate,and innovative means of gaining rapid insight into the status of reptiles are needed inorder to highlight urgent conservation cases and inform environmental policy withappropriate biodiversity information in a timely manner. We present the first everglobal analysis of the conservation status of reptiles, based on a random representativesample of 1,500 species (16% of all currently known species). To our knowledge, ourresults provide the first analysis of the global conservation status and distributionpatterns of reptiles and the threats affecting them, and it highlights conservationpriorities and knowledge gaps which need to be urgently addressed to ensure thecontinued survival of the world?s reptiles. Nearly one in five reptilian species arethreatened with extinction, with another one in five species classed as Data Deficient.The proportion of threatened reptile species is highest in freshwater environments,tropical regions, and on oceanic islands, while data deficiency was highest in tropicalareas such as Central Africa, Southeast Asia and among fossorial reptiles. Our resultsemphasize the need for research attention to be focussed on tropical areas which areexperiencing the most dramatic rates of habitat loss, on fossorial reptiles for whichthere is a chronic lack of data, and on certain taxa such as snakes for which extinctionrisk may currently be underestimated due to lack of population information.Conservation actions specifically need to mitigate the effects of human-inducedhabitat loss and harvesting, which are the predominant threats to reptiles.