Potential effects of future climate change on global reptile distributions and diversity

Climate change has already had adverse effects on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning and these effects are likely to worsen as warming continues in the future. Previous global climate impact assessments on biodiversity have often ignored reptiles as a taxon, due to an incomplete record of global reptile distributions. This has recently changed with the availability of a complete data set on global reptile distributions. Here, we performed a climate impact assessment for reptiles on a global scale.We used species distribution models to infer potential future distributions of 6,296 reptile species. Using these models we assessed potential global as well as realm-specific changes in species richness, as well as species-specific changes in range extent, overlap and position under future climate change. We found a significant decline in reptile richness over time, globally but also for most zoogeographic realms. Range extents were projected to decline considerably in the future, with a low overlap between current and future ranges. Shifts in range centroids differed among realms and taxa, with a dominating global poleward shift. As global climate is continuing to warm, climate impacts together with other anthropogenic impacts will have a strong effect on reptile distributions, which is cause for serious concern. Given that previous global climate impact assessments have often ignored reptile distributions, there is an urgent need for a re-assessment of global reptile conservation efforts, with a specific focus on anticipated future climate change.