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Description
Worldwide biodiversity decline presents major environmental challenges for land managers. With the continuing incursion of human development into natural spaces, land managers regularly face decisions regarding impacts on protected species. Translocation is often used to remove individuals of managed species from the path of harm, and place them in a suitable patch of adjacent, un-impacted habitat. The flat-tailed horned lizard (Phrynosoma mcallii), a lizard native to southwest Arizona and Southern California desert valleys, is the target of extensive conservation and mitigation efforts, and presents a unique opportunity to expand the field of herpetological translocation and assess the efficacy of translocation as a mitigation tool for a species of special concern. In southeastern Arizona, we translocated 479 flat-tailed horned lizards from a project footprint into surrounding habitat (25 m - 11 km) and tracked over 100 translocated and non-translocated lizards via radio telemetry. We compared patterns of daily movement, space use, survival, and behavior between these groups to assess effects of translocation. Differences in daily movement and space use were sex-specific in different years, but effects were moderate. Translocation did not seem to have an effect on survival in 2012. In 2013 overall survival was higher, but translocated individuals exhibited lower survival than control lizards. Overall, our results suggest a moderate effect of translocation compared to similar studies, and that mitigation translocation may be an acceptable management tool for this species if combined with continued habitat preservation. We recommend targeting reproductive success and long-term survival in future studies for a more complete understanding of translocation effects on flat- tailed horned lizards.
