What we do at GARD
We are producing digitized maps of reptile diversity. We mapped the distributions of all terrestrial reptiles, and will map marine species shortly. Species lists are based on the most up to date version of Peter Uetz's "reptile database" (http://reptile-database.org/), which are continuously updated to reflect revisions and newly described species. Thus our maps are also constantly being updated to reflect these changes. We divided chores among workshop participants by regions and taxa, and maps are being produced as polygons, atlas data (presence/absence from grid cells) or point localities, as appropriate. Maps are either drawn directly as GIS shape files, or on pre-prepared regional maps of known projections that can be scanned and recognized by the GIS software automatically. Base maps including required layers (ecoregions, rivers, topography etc.) have been produced to help with estimating ranges and a protocol for producing range maps with uniform metadata was disseminated to group members. Distributions in regions with good (and not so good) published maps are being digitized at Tel Aviv University by members (and former members) of the Meiri lab (Anat Feldman, Yuval Itescu, Amir Lewin, Oliver Tallowin, Enav Vidan, Erez Maze and Maria Novosolov, Alex Slavenko, Karin Tamar). We are contacting additional experts for regions where we have little expertise, as necessary. We have pretty finished digitizing the distribution of ALL REPTILE SPECIES as of April 2015, then proceeded to have the data 'cleaned up' and making sure all was sufficiently in order, and started analyzing the results for various publications. The first of which a manuscript containing the first complete version of the distribution of all reptiles (internally known as GARD 1.1) has now been published in Nature Ecology & Evolution (Roll et al. 2017). The second version (GARD 1.5) was used in Gumbs et al. 2020 (see "publications tab) and is now available upon request from Uri Roll and Shai Meiri. The third version (GARD 1.7), the latest now publicly available, was published by Caetano et al. (2022) modelling the extinction risk of all then-mapped species.
We are currently working on updating and further improving the distribution data, this time verifying each and every range, by the best herpetologists with knowledge of the regions and taxa. If you think you can and want to be part: let us kniw (uncshai/@tauex.tau.ac.il)
We are currently working on updating and further improving the distribution data, this time verifying each and every range, by the best herpetologists with knowledge of the regions and taxa. If you think you can and want to be part: let us kniw (uncshai/@tauex.tau.ac.il)
