Introduction to Reptile Conservation

Abstract. 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) The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species (IUCN, 2014). Furthermore, there are 964 reptile species listed in the IUCN Red List Extinct, Extinct in the Wild, Critically Endangered (CR), Endangered and Vulnerable (VU) categories, which is 9·6% of the species listed in The Reptile Database.