Climate change, lizard populations, and species vulnerability/persistence: trends in ecological and predictive climate studies

The impact of climate change on the Earth’s environments has been widely discussed, although there is still little consensus on the degree of influence, and to what extent the effects are positive, negative or neutral. Predicting the impacts of climate change on organisms and their response to this process has been a growing challenge for ecologists in recent years. In this review, we surveyed the published research on the relationship between lizards and global climate change. We surveyed the keywords “climate change” and “warming”, combined with “lizard*” (there is, all words with this prefix), in three reference databases. We identified 401 relevant papers, and analyzed in further detail the group of studies (59 papers, 14.7% of the total) that developed thermoregulatory models to predict the persistence of lizards in a scenario of global warming. These 59 papers focused on species of 13 lizard families found on five continents. Overall, 62.5% of the papers that predicted the impacts of climate change on lizards indicated negative effects, while 21.9% reported positive effects, and 15.6%, a neutral scenario. The lizards identified as the most vulnerable to warming were tropical, viviparous, and thermoconformers, whereas species adapted to cooler climates would be the most likely to benefit from warming. On a broader scale, however, this scenario would lead to competition between lowland and highland lizards, for example, for thermally favorable areas. We conclude that it will be important to develop more detailed models that contemplate the specific features of each group for the development of more reliable predictions, in addition to the need for social conservation projects and the systematic identification of priority areas for conservation.