A 21st-century vision for neotropical snake systematics

Abstract

We live in an unprecedented age for systematics and biodiversity studies. Ongoing global change is leading to a future with reduced species richness and ecosystem function (Pereira, Navarro, & Martins, 2012). Yet, we know more about biodiversity now than at any time in the past. For squamates in particular, we have range maps for all species (Roll et al., 2017), phylogenies containing estimates for all species (Tonini, Beard, Ferreira, Jetz, & Pyron, 2016), and myriad ecological and natural-history datasets for a large percentage of species (Meiri et al., 2013; Mesquita et al., 2016). For neotropical snakes, a recent synthesis of museum specimens and verified localities offers a fine-grained perspective on their ecogeographic distribution in Central and South America, and the Caribbean (Guedes et al., 2018).