Biodiversity in Australia's National Reserve System - Part ... - BushBlitz

are mammals. Reptiles are the least well recorded group. Reptiles are less likely to be
surveyed and reported by people and so have relatively less information available on their
presence inside or outside of the PA network. Of particular note is that no reptile species is
located in greater than 100 large reserves, which is the category most likely to provide a
secure conservation future. Further survey work is likely to change this and is highly
recommended.
In contrast to the vertebrate groups, invertebrates are equally likely to be poorly reserved as
they are to be well reserved. That is, an invertebrate species is equally likely to have less
than 10% of the available records in PAs as it is to have over 45% of its known records
within PAs. Over 50% of the invertebrate taxa represented by more than 10 record sites are
known from fewer than 100 PAs. Invertebrates tend to have much smaller distributions than
vertebrates and so it is expected that they will fall into less PAs on average; they do not occur
in distributions encompassing large numbers of PAs. However, as with the reptiles, there are
still many species with larger distributions that still are not known from more than 100 PAs
whereas they may be expected to do so.
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