Are reptiles toast? A worldwide evaluation of Lepidosauria vulnerability to climate change

While most of the available studies on climate change effects on Lepidosauria focused on changes in species distribution, none has focused on evaluating biogeographic and phylogenetic patterns of these effects. Here, we aimed to test if some lepidosaurian clades are more likely to be vulnerable than others and if their vulnerability corresponds with zoogeographic-related climatic conditions. We measured Pagel’s λ and Blomberg’s K and indicated a significant phylogenetic signal of lepidosaurians’ vulnerability to climate change, which tends to increase towards more recent clades. We performed a parsimony analysis of endemicity to determine the most climatically vulnerable zoogeographical realms, considering local lepidosaurian vulnerability. We recovered that taxa occurring in multiple zoogeographical realms are usually vulnerable across different geographic regions. Thus, we indicated that the lepidosaurian vulnerability is not related to their occurrence area, since most of the clades are shown to be vulnerable despite their biogeographic distribution or local climate conditions. We conducted a meta-analysis and showed that climate change is globally affecting taxa distribution, with no effects of heterogeneity. Finally, we performed a panbiogeographical analysis and found that Neotropical, Afrotropical, Australian, and Nearctic realms contain the highest number of biotic convergence zones. Areas with high spatial concentration of diversity also presented a greater number of vulnerable species, indicating that these areas can be possible targets for conservation at a larger scale and may help to identify especially diverse areas for conservation efforts at a small scale, focusing on buffering the effects of climate change on local populations.