[en] A precise knowledge of the spatial distribution of taxa is essential for decision-making processes in land management and biodiversity conservation, both for present and under future global change scenarios. This is a key base for several scientific disciplines (e.g. macro-ecology, biogeography, evolutionary biology, spatial planning, or environmental impact assessment) that rely on species distribution maps. An atlas summarizing the distribution of European amphibians and reptiles with 50×50 km resolution maps based on ca. 85,000 grid records was published by the Societas Europaea Herpetologica (SEH) in 1997. Since then, more detailed species distribution maps covering large parts of Europe became available, while taxonomic progress has led to a plethora of taxonomic changes including new species descriptions. To account for these progresses, we compiled information from different data sources: published in books and websites, ongoing national atlases, personal data kindly provided to the SEH, the 1997 European Atlas, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). Databases were homogenised, deleting all information except species names and coordinates, projected to the same coordinate system (WGS84) and transformed into a 50×50 km grid. The newly compiled database comprises more than 384,000 grid and locality records distributed across 40 countries. We calculated species richness maps as well as maps of Corrected Weighted Endemism and species distribution types (i.e. groups of species with similar distribution patterns) by hierarchical cluster analysis using Jaccard’s index as association measure. Our analysis serves as a preliminary step towards an interactive, dynamic and online distributed database system (NA2RE system) of the current spatial distribution of European amphibians and reptiles (see http://na2re.ismai.pt). The NA2RE system will serve as well to monitor potential temporal changes in their distributions. Grid maps of all species are made available along with this paper as a tool for decision-making and conservation-related studies and actions. We also identify taxonomic and geographic gaps of knowledge that need to be filled, and we highlight the need to add temporal and altitudinal data for all records, to allow tracking potential species distribution changes as well as detailed modelling of the impacts of land use and climate change on European amphibians and reptiles.
Research Center/Unit :
AFFISH-RC - Applied and Fundamental FISH Research Center - ULiège
Disciplines :
Life sciences: Multidisciplinary, general & others Environmental sciences & ecology Zoology
Author, co-author :
Sillero, Neftali; Universidade do Porto
Campos, João
Bonardi, Anna
Corti, Claudia
Creemers, Raymond
Crochet, Pierre-Andre
Crnobrnja Isailovic, Jelka
Denoël, Mathieu ; Université de Liège - ULiège > Département de Biologie, Ecologie et Evolution > Biologie du comportement - Ethologie et psychologie animale
Ficetola, Gentile Francesco
Gonçalves, João
Kuzmin, Sergei
Lymberakis, Petros
de Pous, Philippe
Rodriguez, Ariel
Sindaco, Roberto
Speybroeck, Jeroen
Toxopeus, Bert
Vieites, David R.
Vences, Miguel; Technische Universität Braunschweig
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