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Reptile Biodiversity. Standard Methods for Inventory and Monitoring. R. W. McDiarmid, M. S. Foster, C. Guyer, J. W. Gibbons, and N. Chernoff (eds.). 2012. University of California Press, ISBN 9780520266711. 412 p. $95.00 (hardcover). - When I began my herpetological career, the science of conservation biology was in its infancy, and most treatises on biodiversity conservation took the formula of Red Hata Books that highlighted more about what was not known than what researchers knew of the status of reptiles, liven in ecological studies, most of us selected our study sites and sampled reptile populations as Rick Shine states in the Preface (p. ix) to Reptile Biodiversity: "I'd just go out there, look for snakes, find some, catch them, and then write down anything that seemed useful. And somehow, or other, once I'd been doing that long enough, I'd have a data set that could then tell all kinds of interesting stories about the biology of the creatures in question." Fortunately over the last 30 years, the selection of sites, the types of data taken, and the research techniques available for studying reptile populations has left the era of the early Red Data Books long behind.
Reptile Biodiversity proceeds from a perspective that inventorying and monitoring is rigorous science, not just an addendum put into a conservation agreement to satisfy a bureaucratic requirement. As such, researchers and natural resource managers require a wide-ranging background in how to sample species and in how data should and should not be interpreted. The way sites are selected and surveyed determines the extent and rigor of statistical inference and thereby the confidence researchers take in testing hypotheses and in the development of conservation and management programs. Sampling biases matter, and the recognition and understanding of biases and limitations allows researchers to avoid making the Type I and Type II errors common in data interpretation. Inventory and monitoring combine interdisciplinary rigor of fieldwork and knowledge of animals in their habitats with the complexity of trends, population, and landscape analyses. The basic statistical background information in Reptile Biodiversity should be required reading for anyone undertaking biological field studies, regardless of taxa surveyed.
The book is organized into four parts: Introduction, Planning a Diversity Study, Sampling Reptile Diversity, and Conclusion. Each part...