Global assessment of reptile distributions

Workshop dates

1st Workshop: 4-6 November 2008; Silwood Park
2nd Workshop: 27-29 October 2009; Silwood Park
3rd Workshop - TBC

Main subjects
Biodiversity, Biogeography, Climate Change, Conservation, Endemism, Hotspots, Species Richness, Threat

Organiser

Shai Meiri
Department of Zoology
Faculty of Life Sciences
Tel-Aviv University
69978 Tel Aviv, Israel
+972 (0)3 6409811
http://www.tau.ac.il/lifesci/departments/zoology/members/meiri/meiri.html

General Description

We are gathering species-level data on the global reptile distributions.
The new database will be analyzed to identify drivers of richness, endemism, congruence with other taxa, and threat, and to model distribution under climate change.

Reptiles are the only terrestrial vertebrate class the without known species-level global distributions.
While regional data exist for some areas (e.g., Australia, Europe) elsewhere (e.g., SE. Asia, much of Africa, N. South America) distributions are unmapped.
The workshop will bring together herpetologists specializing on the reptile faunas of these uncharted areas to produce expert-drawn maps for species the distribution of which is unpublished. These data will thus be generated anew, and allow global reptile distribution to be known for the first time.
Data will then be digitized to create a global distribution map.

These data will be used to address the following questions:
1) Correlates of species richness (historical correlates / environmental correlates): Can we predict distribution from diversification - historical components rather than current-day climate? - could, say, geckos be rich in places that have a long history of having rock escarpments (e.g., the Kimberley and Pilbara)?
2) Are there different types of hotspots e.g., for rarity, richness and endemism?
3) What is the cross taxon congruence - both between reptiles and other taxa and within reptiles: squamates and non, lizard and snakes, families
4) Identifying geographic centres of diversifications - where are the taxa that demark basal splits?
5) Phylogenetic diversity and times of diversification.
6) Sampling - can we identify undersampling from the distribution maps?
7) Species distribution maps and models - can we use them to examine where we may look for new species ?
8) Mapping traits (size, activity times, diets), life history, peritoneal pigmentation etc.
9) Mapping functional diversity
10) Modeling future distributions under climate change
11) Range size (Rapoport's Rule)
12) Species richness of species described in different years (hotspots move from N. America to SE Asia?)
13) Richness vs. human footprint

The data will be further used to advance towards a global reptile assessment
Climatic modelling will be used to generate scenarios of modifications in reptile distributions under climate change.

While increasing aridity and temperatures globally may cause wide-ranging extinction of temperate biota, these very processes can be predicted to benefit reptiles, that are usually thought to be highly thermophilic and aridity-resistant.
We will model reptile distribution with current climate change projections to identify possible benefactors on the one hand and species that are likely to be facing greater risks of extinction on the other.

Workshop participants

Summary of main results

We are producing digitised maps of reptile diversity, starting with lizards and moving on to snakes. Species lists will be based on Peter's database (Uetz e tal. 2009), which are continuously updated to reflect revisions and newly described species. We divided chores among workshop participants by region, and maps will be produced as either polygons or point localities, as appropriate. Maps will either be drawn directly as GIS shape files, or on pre-prepared regional maps of known projections that can be scanned and recognized by the GIS software automatically. Base maps including required layers (soils, rivers, biomes etc.) have been produced to help with estimating ranges and a protocol for producing range maps was published and is now being updated following the experience of the past year. Distributions in regions with good published maps will be digitized at Tel Aviv University. We will contact additional experts for regions where we have little expertise, as necessary. We have agreed (almost) on the nature of the metadata to be recorded for each map. We are planning a new meeting - the place and date of which depends upon funding (we have submitted a couple of grant applications to that effect). Possible analyses, publications and issues of intellectual property were discussed. Results will be analyzed in a phylogenetic context to determine what aspect evolutionary history has on the current distribution of reptiles.