A global assessment of amphibian and reptile responses to land-use changes

Abstract

Human land-use changes represent the most important drivers of biodiversity loss, and amphibians and reptiles represent the most threatened groups of vertebrates globally. However, today there is a general lack of knowledge and little consensus on how land-use changes affect amphibians and reptiles. In order to fill this gap, here we conduct the most comprehensive systematic quantitative review of primary research to date. By means of hierarchical meta-analyses we assessed the effects of the most common land-use changes (agriculture, cattle-raising, urbanization, deforestation, silviculture and selective logging) on the richness of amphibian and reptile communities. Our results show that almost all of the analyzed types of land-use changes have negative effects on these groups, but with different degree of magnitude. We also show that the time elapsed in disturbed conditions does not ameliorate the effects on species richness, indicating a low recovery capacity of herp communities. Another important finding is that the richest communities are the most negatively affected ones, varying the response according to the type of biome. Our synthesis provides updated empirical evidence indicating that current prevalent human land-use changes strongly reduce the richness of amphibian and reptile species as well as revealing important knowledge gaps in certain biomes of the world. These results should help providing a basis for the development of future research and contextualizing the need for effective conservation measures for these two vertebrate groups.