Abstract
In the present work, we use an exceptional database including 5,359 records of 101 species of Oman’s terrestrial reptiles together with spatial tools to infer the spatial patterns of species richness and endemicity, to infer the habitat preference of each species and to better define conservation priorities, with especial focus on the effectiveness of the protected areas in preserving this unique arid fauna. Our results indicate that the sampling effort is not only remarkable from a taxonomic point of view, with multiple observations for most species, but also for the spatial coverage achieved. The observations are distributed almost continuously across the two-dimensional climatic space of Oman defined by the mean annual temperature and the total annual precipitation and across the Principal Component Analysis (PCA) of the multivariate climatic space and are well represented within 17 out of the 20 climatic clusters grouping 10% of the explained climatic variance defined by PC1 and PC2. Species richness is highest in the Hajar and Dhofar Mountains, two of the most biodiverse areas of the Arabian Peninsula, and endemic species richness is greatest in the Jebel Akhdar, the highest part of the Hajar Mountains. Oman’s 22 protected areas cover only 3.91% of the country, including within their limits 63.37% of terrestrial reptiles and 50% of all endemics. Our analyses show that large areas of the climatic space of Oman lie outside protected areas and that seven of the 20 climatic clusters are not protected at all. The results of the gap analysis indicate that most of the species are below the conservation target of 17% or even the less restrictive 12% of their total area within a protected area in order to be considered adequately protected. Therefore, an evaluation of the coverage of the current network of protected areas and the identification of priority protected areas for reptiles using reserve design algorithms are urgently needed. Our study also shows that more than half of the species are still pending of a definitive evaluation by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN).
Highlights
Reptiles represent the world’s most diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates (10,544 species; [1]) and are a major component of the global biodiversity, remarkable from an ecological and evolutionary point of view [2]
Our analyses show that large areas of the climatic space of Oman lie outside protected areas and that seven of the 20 climatic clusters are not protected at all
Because of the past but especially the recent interest in Oman herpetology, the country’s current level of taxonomic knowledge ranks among the highest in Asia, with most of the groups having been investigated using integrative approaches including both morphological and molecular data analyzed with multivariate, phylogenetic and population genetic methods (see Carranza et al (2016) [27] for a recent example)
Summary
Reptiles (a paraphyletic assemblage that includes all non-avian sauropsids) represent the world’s most diverse group of terrestrial vertebrates (10,544 species; [1]) and are a major component of the global biodiversity, remarkable from an ecological and evolutionary point of view [2]. Reptiles are greatly affected by the thermal landscapes of their habitat They are relatively easy to catch and sample for phylogenetic studies, they are widely represented in museum collections worldwide (which facilitates morphological studies) and, for many groups, there is abundant and detailed information on their taxonomy, distribution ranges and ecology [1, 7,8,9,10]. For these and other reasons they constitute excellent models for evolutionary, biogeographic, ecologic and conservation studies, and have been used as such for many decades [6, 11,12,13].
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