Snakes Diversity and Strategies for its Conservation at the Parque Nacional Natural Munchique, State of Cauca, Colombia

15 May 2014 La Romelia, Colombia, Central and Latin America

Luis Enrique Vera Pérez

Contribute to the knowledge of the snakes diversity in the Parque Nacional Natural Munchique and develop strategies for its conservation.

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The first step in the development of this project will be an approach with the human community that inhabit the Parque Nacional Natural Munchique and its buffer zones to present the details of this project together with a series of workshops which principal aim is the snakes conservation, and consist in provide information about the following topics:

(1) general aspects of snakes,

(2) differentiation between poisonous and non-poisonous snakes,

(3) ecological and medical importance of snakes and

(4) prevention and first aid of snakebites.

Second step is the field work that consist in the sampling at the different hábitats present in each one of the sectors through the non-restricted searching method with emphasis in the microhabitats both in daytime as night to cover all the snakes activity schedules. Snakes will be captured using herpetological tongs and hooks for its posterior introduction into suitable containers. For each individual captured the following data will be taken:

(1) type of habitat and microhabitat (if applicable),

(2) date and time and

(3) geoposition.

All captured snakes will be marked with an non-invasive photographed, but only individuals of difficult taxonomic identification or few specimens in Biological Collections will be collected. Before release, all individuals captured will be marked with a small non-invasive cut in a specific ventral scale to avoid overestimating the species abundance but captured snakes will also be used as a complementary teaching tool to improve the information provided to the human community at the workshops.The species identification will be performed by using keys and scientific papers on taxonomic revisions of some genera and by comparisons with specimens stored in Herpetological Collections. The taxonomic level of individuals will be assumed based on THE REPTILE DATABASE criteria. The third step is the analysis of the information obtained. For each of the sectors will be made comparisons of the abundance and composition of different habitat types using the similarity and complementary indices. Comparisons were also made between the three sectors to determine if the composition (species richness) is statistically similar or different between them. All this results added to the species' natural history information will be useful to get arguments that allow to assess the conservation status of the recorded species.

Finally, the last step is the dissemination of the results of this research to the human community present in the study area and later among the scientific community.

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