According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), 21% of reptile species worldwide were threatened with extinction as of 2022. However, until recently there have been few details of the kinds of threats affecting distinct species in specific geographical areas, and as a result, important reptile conservation opportunities may have been missed.
A team of researchers from Denmark, Mozambique, Spain, Sweden, and the U.K. aims to provide more precision in this area. The team has calculated, at regional levels throughout the world, the probability that specific biodiversity threats could affect threatened species. Their work, titled “The threats to reptiles at global and regional scales,” is published on the bioRxiv preprint server.
Reptiles can serve as bioindicators, giving clues to the overall health of ecosystems through symptoms or responses that can be easily measured.
According to the IUCN’s 2022 data, there are 10,196 reptile species in the world, and at least 1,829 of them are listed as threatened. But as the study points out, the list of threatened species by itself is not enough to support effective conservation efforts; we need to know what and where specific threats are, and how likely they are to affect a given species.
From the IUCN Red List of threatened species, the researchers obtained range maps of reptile species, ultimately including ranges of 9,827 terrestrial reptiles in their study (48 species of sea snakes and six species of sea turtles were excluded).
2023-09-18 05:24:02
Link from phys.org