Global conservation strategies for twoclades of snakes: combining taxon-specificgoals with general prioritization schemes

Abstract

Aim We present the first attempt of mapping global conservation priorities fortwo snake clades, Viperidae and Elapidae. We compared the global conservationpriorities of each clade with the nine global conservation schemes defined byBrooks et al. to evaluate how effective these schemes are in ensuring thepreservation of viperid and elapid biodiversity.Location Global.Methods Based on range maps of 228 species of Viperidae and 224 species ofElapidae, we used systematic conservation planning methods of complementarityand irreplaceability to generate a set of conservation networks under two costscenarios: (1) minimizing conservation-human development conflicts and (2)maximizing environmental suitability for high snake richness. Analysis of variancewas used to investigate whether the mean irreplaceability of cells matching theareas covered by each of the nine global prioritization schemes in Brooks et al.was higher than the mean irreplaceability of cells located outside these areas.Results Overall, few areas showed irreplaceability higher than 0.5 based on a goalof representing 25% of the species’ ranges. The conservation networks generatedin expectation of low conflicts between human development and conservationwere quite different from the networks of high environmental suitability. Areaswith higher irreplaceability coincided with the regions covered by global schemesof Endemic Bird Areas (for Viperidae and Elapidae) and High-BiodiversityWilderness (for Elapidae).Main conclusions Our findings indicated the existence of viable conservationopportunities for these two snake groups. This study can be viewed as a way toovercome, at least in part, the recent criticism concerning the independentdevelopment of several global conservation priorities by evaluating which groupsof organisms are better represented in each of them. More than simplydetermining priorities for snakes’ conservation, our analyses showed that thedevelopment of parallel priority-setting initiatives can be reconciled with thosestrategies for which financial resources are already being designed.