Introduction to Reptile Conservation

Reptiles are a very diverse group with a long evolutionary history dating back 300 million years to the Pennsylvanian subsystem of the Carboniferous period (Hedges & Poling, 1999; Sahney et al., 2010). Reptiles have adapted to a variety of habitats in environments ranging from temperate to hot and moist to arid. Compared with birds and mammals, reptiles often have very restricted distributions with specific microhabitat requirements; making them particularly vulnerable to anthropogenic environmental changes (Anderson, 1984; Anderson & Marcus, 1992). As such, reptiles are a group of conservation concern. Of the 10 038 described species listed in The Reptile Database (Uetz & Hošek, 2014), 44% (c. 4416 species) have been evaluated for the International Union for Conservation of Nature's (IUCN)…