Threat Assessment and Conservation Prioritization of the Herpetofauna of El Salvador

Abstract

We applied the IUCN Red List method for threat assessment to the amphibians and reptiles of El Salvador, the smallest Central American country. Seventy-six out of 130 species were found to be threatened or endangered at the national level. In general, most threatened taxa were aquatic organisms in lowland habitats or cloud-forest specialists in highland areas. The IUCN method was biased by collecting effort and was unable to classify 25 species that were categorized as ȁ8data deficientȁ9. We used the number and distribution of threatened species and a complementarity analysis to identify departments in El Salvador that require higher priority for conservation action. We applied a method for evaluating inventory completeness to our data set, and used species from reasonably well-surveyed taxonomic groups (Anura and Sauria) to carryout the complementarity analysis. The anurans (frogs) and saurians (lizards) had been inventoried relatively completely in 10 of 14 departments. The department with the most threatened species (35 of 76 threatened amphibians and reptiles) is Santa Ana, where many threatened species occur in pine-oak and cloud forest in Montecristo National Park.