Anole PDF Scavenger Hunt

**UPDATE (July 17, 2012): Thanks to all the folks who have contributed literature – it’s a huge help! We’ve made good progress towards our first goal of obtaining all original descriptions of Anolis species. Here’s an updated “Most Wanted List.” We’re pretty close to knocking them out….

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Anole bibliophiles and reference collectors,

The Anoline Lizard Specialist Group has a favor to ask, and one to return as well: We need your help assembling a digital reference library for Anolis literature.

Our goal? – To compile PDFs of every published piece of literature relevant to the taxonomy or conservation of Anolis lizards.

The reason we’re doing this is to aid in the IUCN Red List assessment process for anoles. Having ready access to this literature dramatically simplifies the task of conducting and reviewing species assessments. Also, as the IUCN’s “Red List Authority” for Anolis lizards, the ALSG will soon maintain an authoritative list of currently recognized anole species. Ready access to the anole taxonomic literature will facilitate this as well.

We already started this process, and we’ve made a good dent.  Like many of you, we’ve been amassing anole PDFs for years (albeit sometimes haphazardly).  We recently organized our collections and put them together to see what we had.  Nearly a dozen awesome volunteer undergrads at UC Davis pitched in and helped contribute a lot of key references we missed, but that were readily available online.  We managed to cobble together about 850 references, which I think is a good start.

Now we’re turning to you, the anole community, to help us fill in the gaps.  We’d like to ask if you guys have PDFs of key references we’re missing, and if not, if you’d be willing to track them down (most will require access to a university library), scan them to PDF, and then share them with us.

We hope to make this mutually beneficial. If you’d be so kind as to share your references with us, we’d be more than happy to return the favor and share references that we have and that you might need. If you peruse what we already have, you’ll see it’s a pretty decent, if somewhat heterogeneous, collection.

As I mentioned above, our priority is to find refs of taxonomic or conservation relevance, but we’re ultimately interested in compiling anole references of any sort. Our plan is to proceed in stages:

1. First, we’ll aim to assemble every primary description of the anole species.
2. Second, we’ll go for subspecies descriptions and taxonomic changes.
3. Last, and by no means least, we’ll aim to collate the massive literature on the distribution, natural history, and conservation of anoles, plus any other anole literature we can track down.

We’re only about 36 references short of assembling all of the primary type references for Anolis.  We’ll end with links to two lists.  The first is a spreadsheet listing the primary type descriptions we haven’t managed to assemble.  This is our “Most Wanted List.”  The second is a list detailing everything we’ve assembled so far.  Basically, if you’ve got it, and it’s not on this second list, and it pertains to anoles, send it along!

Before signing off, we wanted to note that our efforts are strictly for research purposes. We don’t intend to publicly post or indiscriminately disseminate copyrighted materials – all of these resources will be used for conservation research, or shared on an individual basis with others conducting specific research projects.

If you’re interested in helping out, please email Luke Mahler at: lmahler at gmail dot com.

Thanks guys,
Luke Mahler and Rosario Castañeda (ALSG), and Peter Uetz (The Reptile Database)

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Luke Mahler

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