Overcoming data deficiency in reptiles
By Lucie Bland, M. Böhm. 2016
87 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We have no information on the risk of extinction of 21% of reptiles listed as Data Deficient on the Sampled Red List Index (SRLI), an indicator developed to track global change in species status. Data Deficient species are of high research priority, because they contribute to uncertainty in estimates of extinction risk and are neglected by conservation programmes. We review the causes of data deficiency in reptiles; the likely status of Data Deficient reptiles; and possible solutions for their re-assessment. We find that 52% of Data Deficient reptiles lack information on population status and trends, and that few species are only known from type specimens and old records. We build a random forest model for SRLI species of known extinction risk, based on life-history, environmental and threat information. The final model shows perfect classification accuracy (100%) in ten-fold cross validation. We use the model to predict that 56 of 292 Data Deficient reptiles (19%) are at risk of extinction, so the overall proportion of threatened reptiles in the SRLI (19%) remains unchanged. Regions predicted to contain large numbers of threatened Data Deficient reptiles overlap with known centres of threatened species richness. However, the model shows lower accuracy (79%) on 29 species recently re-assessed in the Global Reptile Assessment. Predictive models could be used to prioritize Data Deficient species and reptiles not included in the SRLI, and new reptile assessments could be used to improve model predictions through adaptive learning.
Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0fdb5c108a117d103b8e191dc5cd769cd593ea6b
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In Ecological Modeling
In Ecology
In Global and Planetary Change
- Shai Meiri
- D. G. Chapple
- R. Tingley
- Pasquale Raia
- M. Novosolov
- A. Feldman
- Y. Itescu
- D. Pincheira‐Donoso
Citations in the corpus
- Addressing knowledge gaps in reptile conservation (2016, methodology): “…groups such as GARD (Global Assessment of Reptile Distributions; http://www.gardinitiative.org), are narrowing this taxonomic gap (Meiri et al., 2012; Tingley et al., 2013a, 2013b; Ducatez et al., 2014; Bland and Böhm, 2016; Böhm et al., 2016a, 2016b; Tonini et al., 2016; Tingley et al., in press).”
- Extinct, obscure or imaginary: The lizard species with the smallest ranges (2017, unknown): “It may also reflect the propensity of geckos to have narrow ranges, tropical distribution and nocturnal behaviour (Gamble, Greenbaum, Jackman, & Bauer, 2015; Meiri, 2016; Vidan et al., 2017).”
- Biases in the current knowledge of threat status in lizards, and bridging the ‘assessment gap’ (2016, unknown): “…world's reptiles have focused on developing short-cut methods for predicting threat status in Data Deficient (and potentially non-assessed) species (Bland and Böhm, 2016–in this issue), and improving our knowledge of the reptile fauna of understudied regions such as Australia (Rosauer et al.,…”