Amphibians and reptiles are experiencing severe habitat loss throughout North America; however, this threat to biodiversity can be mitigated by identifying and managing areas that serve a disproportionate role in sustaining herpetofauna. Identification of such areas must take into consideration the dynamic nature of habitat suitability. As climate rapidly changes it is possible that areas currently deemed suitable may no longer be so in the future. To address these needs, we are proposing to generate spatially-explicit data that will (1) identify Priority Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Areas (PARCAs) – those discrete areas most vital to maintaining reptile and amphibian diversity, (2) project regions of current and future climatic suitability for a number of priority reptiles and amphibians in the North Atlantic Landscape Conservation Cooperative, and (3) identify gaps in distributional data for these species that may prevent or inhibit the identification of species-level climatic suitability.
Objective 1, identification of PARCAs will proceed by collecting natural history information, distributional data, and by weighing expert opinion for key species. Objectives 2- 3 will rely on collection of known locality data and the use of inductive species distribution modeling. Collectively, this process will represent the assembling and processing of all necessary information for identifying PARCAs. These approaches will offer a long-term assessment of resiliency of PARCAs identified with respect to those that may provide refugia as the climate changes. A similar project was also funded by the South Atlantic LCC to develop PARCAs within that geography.
