o_19ko2dt161ng2j4e1tgnoqv1s45a.pdf

STATUS OF KNOWLEDGE OF THE MALAYSIAN HERPETOFAUNA
(1,889 m), Gunung Chamah (2,171 m), Gunung Batu Putih (2,132 m), Cameron Highlands
(1628 m) and Fraser’s Hill (1,524 m), besides limestone areas of Gua Musang, Kelantan and
the Kinta Valley area, Perak. Within Borneo, important montane regions requiring additional
work include Gunung Mulu (2,377 m), Gunung Murud (2,423 m), Gunung Kinabalu (4,101
m) and Gunung Dulit (1,311 m). Specific ecological habitats inadequately sampled include
peat swamps and kerangas.
One of the main goals of these studies should be to develop aid to the identification of the
fauna, leading to a comprehensive (i.e., covering all nominal species and subspecies)
monographs, field keys and field guides for the identification of amphibians and reptiles of
Malaysia. Field guides are important in promoting conservation awareness and action, assisting
capacity building, supporting environmental assessments (such as monitoring and evaluation)
of development projects, encouraging ecotourism, building biodiversity databases, land-use
planning through GIS applications and the production of regional and international Red Data
Books of Threatened Species (Whitten 1996).
Contemporary conservation programmes derive substantial inputs from scientific databases
on the distribution, ecology and systematics of regional biodiversity. Identification of hotspots,
be these centres of high diversity or endemicity is critical for reserve selection and design
(Lovich 1994), helping focus scarce conservation money on the areas with the highest priority.
Myers (1988, 1990), utilizing plants as indicators, identified 18 areas of the Earth that support
species disproportionately high for their combined area. Fortuitously, there is a concordence
with the distribution of other taxa as well, and at least 19% of the world’s herpetofauna are
found in Myers’ hotspots (Mittermeier et al. 1992). Biodiversity awareness is generating an
increasing demand for basic information which systematics can provide (see Kottelat 1995).
A priority of the systematist, in the face of rapid loss of habitats, has become the development
of identification tools, critical for promoting environmental awareness and conservation,
supporting environmental impact analyses and for other biodiversity studies.
The information base for amphibian and reptile systematics, taxonomy and field identification
for Peninsular Malaysia continues to be the work of Boulenger (1912), with a substantial
supplement by Smith (1930). The amphibian fauna of Borneo is somewhat better, with field
guides available for the turtles, frogs and snakes (e.g., Inger 1966; Inger & Stuebing 1997;
Stuebing & Inger 1999; Lim & Das 1999). Nonetheless, most of the field guides are not
comprehensive in coverage. Several factors are responsible–the discovery of new species,
reallocation of species to genera other than the ones originally allocated to, and in some
instances, to different families, the synonymy of some names and the revival from synonymy
of others, in addition to new distributional and natural history information. Monographs
prepared in the early part of the last century contain terse descriptions, that would equally fit
several closely related species (or “shoe-horning”), thereby potentially causing serious
underestimation of biodiversity if assessments are made using these resources. Additionally,
neither of the works mentioned carry colour photographs, often critical for field identification.
Work conducted regionally, including in adjacent countries, has lead to a dramatic increase in
the local fauna. For instance, fieldwork conducted in recent years in Vietnam has increased
the number of known species of anuran amphibians by 40 species (N. B. Ananjeva, pers.
comm. 1999).
We conclude by emphasizing the importance of basic sciences for both conservation biology
and biotechnology. Herpetology as an integral part of biodiversity science needs to be
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