Many-spotted Tree Iguana

The iguanian lizard

Liolaemid lizards are South American iguanians of rock, sand, and scrub. Many are live-bearing at altitude.

Range and habitat

The dune lizard is an endemic species of Argentina, living exclusively in the dunes that border the maritime coast of the provinces of Buenos Aires and Río Negro.

GBIF currently lists 204 occurrence points. Those points follow where people logged the taxon — museum drawers and surveys included — not a closed range boundary.

Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.

Habits

It is a sand-dwelling saurian with diurnal habits that lives in the central-eastern part of the Southern Cone of South America.

In crisis

This lizard is categorized as: “vulnerable species”.​ This reptile depends on the protection and interconnection of patches of native vegetation, mainly the espartillares of the esparto de los dunes (Spartina ciliata) and other facies of native coastal psammophytic grasslands.​ As the geonemia of this species develops on a long strip (a few kilometers wide) in correspondence with its environment, it is threatened by reduction and partitioning or fragmentation of coastal dunes caused by activities related to uncontrolled human development, from the complete urbanization of large sectors of the dune strip without environmental planning, through cuts produced by forestation, the reconversion of living dunes into areas of livestock pastures, overgrazing, sand extraction to be used for the construction and use of the dune environment for the entertainment of the population through the free movement of motocross, quadricycles and 4 x 4 (all-terrain) vehicles. As this lizard is extremely faithful to its exclusive habitat, its segmentation also produces the insularization of its populations, that entails a loss of genetic variability as gene flow is interrupted, that results in a decrease in its phenotypic plasticity to be able to face future changes and threats. As the capacity for recolonization of the patches where it is extinct is zero, the populations are increasingly separated from each other.

Many-spotted Tree Iguana is Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.

Sources

Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Many-spotted Tree Iguana — often a short stub, Wikidata item Q5088349 and GBIF occurrence geography. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.