Differential responses of amphibians and reptiles to land-use change in the biodiversity hotspot of north-eastern Madagascar

Large expanses of tropical rainforest have been converted into agricultural landscapes cultivated by smallholder farmers. This is also the case in north-eastern Madagascar; a region that retains significant proportions of forest cover despite slash-and-burn shifting hill rice cultivation and vanilla agroforestry expansion. The region is also a global hotspot for herpetofauna diversity, but how amphibians and reptiles are affected by land-use change remains largely unknown. Using a space-for-time study design, we compared species diversity and community composition across seven prevalent land uses: unburned (old-growth forest, forest fragment, and forest-derived vanilla agroforest) and burned (fallow-derived vanilla agroforest, woody fallow, and herbaceous fallow) land-use types, and rice paddy. We conducted six comprehensive, time-standardized searches across at least 10 replicates per land-use type and applied genetic barcoding to confirm species identification. We documented an exceptional diversity of herpetofauna (119 species; 91% endemic). Observed plot-level amphibian species richness was significantly higher in old-growth forest than in all other land-use types. Plot-level reptile species richness was significantly higher in unburned land-use types compared with burned land-use types. For both amphibians and reptiles, the less-disturbed land-use types showed more uneven communities and the species composition in old-growth forest differed significantly from all other land-use types. Amphibians had higher forest dependency (38% of species occurred exclusively in old-growth forest) than reptiles (26%). Our analyses thus revealed that the two groups respond differently to land-use change: we found less pronounced losses of reptile species richness especially in unburned agricultural habitats, suggesting that reptiles are less susceptible to land-use change than amphibians, possibly due to their ability to cope with hotter and drier microclimates. In conclusion, our findings emphasize existing conservation opportunities - especially for reptiles - in extensive agricultural landscapes while highlighting the precarious situation of amphibians in disappearing old-growth forests.