The Global Assessment of Reptile Distributions (GARD) has been working to create the first global distribution database of reptile species.
We are an informal, largely-unfunded consortium of scientists from across the world that work together to gather species-level data on the global reptile distributions (>12,300 species mapped, as of mid 2025).
The first version of this database has now been published in 2017 exploring conservation priorities for all global tetrapods. The current version (GARD 1.7) was used to model extinction risk of DD and non assessed species. We have recently finished a major upgrade, the largest overhaul since 2017, version 2.0 (still unpublished). We are still twicking it, hoping to publish version 2.1 towards the fall of 2025

Global reptile richness, from Roll et al. 2017 Nat E&E

The new database is being analyzed to identify patterns and drivers of richness, functional diversity, trait/environment relationships, endemism, congruence with other taxa, and threat, and to model distributions under climate change, land use change and other anthropogenic disturbances. We also use it to better understand the biases in our knowledge of global biodiversity

For further details contact Shai Meiri - [email protected]

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For an ISF funded project we are looking for excellent graduate students and post-docs