Extinct, obscure or imaginary: The lizard species with the smallest ranges

By Shai Meiri, A. Bauer, A. Allison, Fernando Castro-Herrera, L. Chirio, G. Colli, I. Das, Tiffany M. Doan, F. Glaw, L. L. Grismer and 19 more. Diversity and Distributions: A journal of biological invasions and biodiversity, 2017

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Small geographic ranges make species especially prone to extinction from anthropogenic disturbances or natural stochastic events. We assemble and analyse a comprehensive dataset of all the world's lizard species and identify the species with the smallest ranges—those known only from their type localities. We compare them to wide‐ranging species to infer whether specific geographic regions or biological traits predispose species to have small ranges.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/fd5555de4cceaba49bd9b1fb3f63955f2ece0e5e