Reptile Biodiversity: Standard Methods for Inventory and Monitoring

From tiny, burrowing lizards to rainforest canopy-dwellers and giant crocodiles, reptile populations everywhere are changing. Yet government and conservation groups are often forced to make important decisions about reptile conservation and management based on inadequate or incomplete data. With contributions from nearly seventy specialists, this volume offers a comprehensive guide to the best methods for carrying out standardized quantitative and qualitative surveys of reptiles, while maximizing comparability of data between sites, across habitats and taxa, and over time. The contributors discuss each method, provide detailed protocols for its implementation, and suggest ways to analyze the data, making this volume an essential resource for monitoring and inventorying reptile abundance, population status, and biodiversity.

Reptile Biodiversity covers topics including:

• terrestrial, marine, and aquatic reptiles

• equipment recommendations and limitations

• ethics of monitoring and inventory activities

• statistical procedures

• designing sampling programs

• using PDAs in the field

Roy W. McDiarmid is a Research Zoologist and Curator of Reptiles for the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center at the National Museum of Natural History. Mercedes S. Foster is a Research Zoologist and Curator of Birds for the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center at the National Museum of Natural History. Craig Guyer is Professor of Biological Sciences at Auburn University. J. Whitfield Gibbons is Professor of Ecology at the University of Georgia and former head of the Environmental Outreach and Education program at the Savannah River Ecology Laboratory. Neil Chernoff is a scientist at the National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.