Abstract
BackgroundIn Chile, most of the timber industry depends on Monterey pine (Pinus radiata (D. Don.)) plantations, which now cover more than 1.5 million ha. In spite of the intensive management of these plantations, they are home to a large number of wildlife species. One of the least known groups in this type of environment are reptiles. For this reason, we conducted a study on the distribution and abundance of reptiles at plantations of different ages in seven sites in the Coastal Range of Central Chile.ResultsFrom seven species that could be potentially found in the study region, a total of five species were recorded, with Liolaemus lemniscatus (Gravenhorst) being the most abundant (with up to 160 ind*ha−1). Detectability of species was similar in young and mature plantations but Liolaemus tenuis (Duméril and Bibron), the most colorful species, showed a higher detection probability than the other species. The highest abundance of reptiles was found in young plantations, and the density of L. lemniscatus and Liolaemus chiliensis (Lesson) declined significantly with plantation development. Liolaemus schroederi (Müller and Hellmich) increased significantly its numbers in 4- to 5-year-old plantations and remained with similar densities in mature plantations. L. tenuis density was low in all plantations and showed no relationship with age. The snake Philodryas chamissonis (Wiegmann) was recorded very few times and only in young plantations. Vegetation characteristics explained a significant proportion of the variation in the abundance of reptiles, with dense understories negatively affecting the abundance of lizards, likely by reducing the amount of heat and sunlight reaching the plantation's interior. The type of microhabitats with the highest number of lizard records was scrub and harvest debris.ConclusionsThis work confirms the role of pine plantations as habitat for an important proportion of reptile species in South Central Chile and provides some relationships with management variables that can be used to enhance the contribution of these artificial forests to biodiversity conservation.
Highlights
In Chile, most of the timber industry depends on Monterey pine
For the estimation of the density of L. chiliensis, we used the average of the correction factors for the other lizard species
The latter criterion is based on the assumption that, in the absence of better information, a ‘general’ detectability curve for Liolaemus lizards will produce a better estimation than not performing any corrections at all which, by definition, represents an understimation
Summary
In Chile, most of the timber industry depends on Monterey pine (Pinus radiata (D. Don.)) plantations, which cover more than 1.5 million ha. Don), which cover more than 1.5 million ha in the country (INFOR 2007) These intensively managed plantations are considered among the most economically successful forest systems of the world (Clapp 2001), there is a growing evidence that the pine plantations of Central Chile support an important number of wildlife species (Estades and Escobar 2005; Saavedra and Simonetti 2005). Rubio and Simonetti (2011) compared the lizard community in a fragmented Nothofagus forest with that of the surrounding pine plantations. These authors recorded a higher number of species in plantations than in the native forest, the tree-dwelling (Manzur and Fuentes 1979) Liolaemus tenuis (Duméril and Bibron) was more abundant in the native forests
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