Comparison effect of future climatic change on the desert and mountain dwelling reptiles in Iran (Paralaudakia caucasia and Saara loricata)

Document Type : Ecology

Authors

1 Department of Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Natural Resources, University of Tehran, Karaj

2 Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum, Senckenberganlage 25, 60325 Frankfurt am Main.

Abstract

Global climate change has been predicted to exert negative impacts over biodiversity. large proportion diverse taxonomic groups is predicted to go extinct under the predicted climate change during the lasts decades species distribution models have become an important tool to predict the impact of climate change on the animal and plant. But very little is known about the effects of climate change on the Iranian Herpetofauna. This study aims to investigate the reptile’s habitat suitability change under current and future climatic conditions in Iran. For this we used four species distribution models (Maximum entropy (Maxent), support vector machines (SVM), generalized linear Model (GLM), artificial neural networks (ANN)) to produce ensemble prediction maps for Paralaudakia caucasia and Saara loricata a mountain and desert dwelling reptiles in Iran. Our result shows suitable habitats will be decline under the current climate change for Paralaudakia caucasia whileclimate change increase suitable habitats for Saara loricata.

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