Addressing climate change and biodiversity loss will be the defining ecological, political, and humanitarian challenge of our time. Alarmingly, policymakers face a narrowing window of opportunity to prevent the worst impacts, necessitating complex decisions about which land to set aside for biodiversity preservation. Yet, our ability to make these decisions is hindered by our limited capacity to predict how species will respond...

Despite multiple recent field studies, herpetological species diversity of the Romblon Island Group in the central Phil- ippines—particularly Sibuyan Island—has remained underestimated. Recently, we investigated the diversity of the herpetofauna of Mount Guiting-Guiting Natural Park, based on an elevational transect (10–1557 m a.s.l.). Our surveys resulted in a total of 47 species of amphibians and reptiles, including 14 new island records and...

Biodiversity monitoring is imperative for understanding how changing climate may impact the distributions of taxa from single species to the spatial distribution of biolog- ical diversity. Large-scale and cross-taxa biodiversity monitoring also allows an empiri- cal understanding of biogeographic patterns across taxa. One such pattern, where in taxonomic richness peaks at tropical latitudes are typically treated as a biogeographical rule with few...

Regions with complex geological histories often have diverse and highly endemic biotas, yet inferring the ecological and historical processes shaping this relationship remains challenging. Here, in the context of the taxon cycle model of insular community assembly,we investigate patterns of lineage diversity and habitat usage in a newly characterized vertebrate radiation centred upon the world’s most geologically complex insular region: island arcs...

In this synopsis, we provide basic information relating to each of the currently known species of snakes that has been recorded from the Philippines. The references included with each account provide guidance to literature that contains additional information. This work represents an up-to-date account of the snake fauna of the Philippine Archipelago....

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) commits its 196 nation parties to conserve biological diversity, use its components sustainably, and share fairly and equitably the benefits from the utilization of genetic resources. The last of these objectives was further codified in the Convention’s Nagoya Protocol (NP), which came into effect in 2014. Although these aspirations are laudable, the NP and resulting national...

The aridification of Africa resulted in the fragmentation of forests and the expansion of an arid corridor stretching from the northeast to southwest portion of sub-Saharan Africa, but the role this corridor has had in species-level diversification of southern African vertebrates is poorly understood. The skink species Mochlus afer and M. sundevallii inhabit wide areas of the arid corridor and are therefore...

Based on molecular and morphological data sets, we describe a new species of scincid lizard of the genus Lygosoma from Indochina, and redescribe true Lygosoma quadrupes (Linnaeus, 1766). The new species is small and slender, and represents the third member of the L. quadrupes complex, increasing the diversity of Lygosoma species recognized in Southeast Asia to 24. Based on the reevaluation of...

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Philicoris, a new genus of the mirid subfamily Deraeocorinae, tribe Hyaliodini, is described from the Philippines. New species Philicoris mayon sp. n. and Philicoris palali sp. n. from the island of Luzon are documented with photographic images of the dorsal habitus and male genital structures....