Abstract

BRIZIO, María Victoria  and  PEREZ, Daniel R.. Lizards: “passengers” or “drivers” in restoration processes? A review and perspectives. Multequina [online]. 2021, vol.30, n.2, pp.211-225. ISSN 1852-7329.

The aspects of biodiversity addressed have focused mainly on the vegetation, assuming that the fauna would return after the return of the flora. Fauna could participate in restoration in two ways: as “passengers”, responding passively to the developing habitat provided by plant regeneration, or as “drivers”, determining the trajectories of plant regeneration. In this framework, the goal of our work was to evaluate in the scientific literature the current state of knowledge about the relationship of lizards with ecological restoration, with special emphasis on arid zones. From a bibliographic search with the keywords “lizard” and “restoration” we found 72 publications that reported the lizards as “passengers”, and only three publications as “drivers” of ecological restoration. According to our results, the countries with the highest number of studies linking lizards to restoration are Australia, the United States and New Zealand. We consider that these works may influence progress on this issue in the arid zones of Latin America, in many of which these animals possibly exhibit a fundamental role.

Keywords : Arid zones; Assisted regeneration; Natural regeneration; Reptiles; Sauria.

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