The Herpetological Journal

https://doi.org/10.33256/31.3.132141

pp. 132-141

Authors: Ashish Kumar Jangid, Gandla Chethan Kumar, Chandra Prakash Singh & Monika Böhm

Abstract: The Short-tailed ground agama or Hardwicke’s bloodsucker Calotes minor (Hardwicke & Gray, 1827) is known to occur in the Indian subcontinent and is largely confined to arid to semiarid environments, such as hard barren desert and abandoned fields. The precise distribution of this species is largely unknown to date, with few locality records spread biogeographically across Eastern Pakistan, Central and Western India. To improve on the existing spatial knowledge on this species and assess the ability to predict species distributions for taxa with few locality records, we studied the distribution of C. minor using a species distribution modelling framework. Our study allowed us to predict the distribution range of C. minor and help define a niche for this habitat-specific species. Highly probable habitats for C. minor were arid and semi-arid dryland habitats, characterised by plains or less rugged terrain with moderately narrow temperature range, lower aridity index, moderate
to low vegetation index, and wide precipitation range. Furthermore, we report four additional occurrence records of C. minor from central Rajasthan.

Keywords: Agamidae; small sample size; environmental niche modelling; distribution range; arid environment