MARQUES ET AL.; AMPHIBIANS AND TERRESTRIAL REPTILES OF ANGOLA 
49 
Chelonians 
Figure 30. Conservation assessment for the different groups of Angolan amphibians and reptiles (exeluding marine 
turtles) aeeording to the eurrent lUCN Red List elassifieation. Blaek wedges indieate taxa not listed/reeognized by lUCN. 
tion are critical because these criteria are nearly always used in assigning categories to amphibians 
and reptiles under lUCN criteria, as other information on population size, trends, and/or threats are 
typically unavailable. With the currently available knowledge, it is almost impossible to say 
whether many amphibian and reptile species are widespread in Angola and in viable populations 
or if they instead are found in limited areas and threatened by local habitat destruction or other 
factors. Addressing these gaps in knowledge is especially important now as recent rapid economic 
growth following the end of the civil war means that many habitats might have been recently lost 
or degraded (USAID 2008). 
Whereas the war has taken a terrible toll on larger mammals that have been used by local 
populations for food, the conflict may have spared certain areas from human influence, notably 
habitat alteration, because many people fled from the countryside to the cities. In the case of 
amphibians and reptiles, the long term abandonment of certain areas by humans may have been 
beneficial as it was, for example, for plants (Huntley and Matos 1994) and possibly for birds (see 
Caceres et al. 2015). This is especially true for areas where large-scale agricultural exploitation 
existed, including coffee plantations in the Angolan central escarpment, which with abandonment 
have reverted to secondary forest cover, but also other planned civil works, such as dams, newly 
urbanized areas, and other facilities that were aborted by the war. With the end of conflict, 
communities are being reestablished in the Angolan countryside, and agriculture, both traditional 
subsistence slash-and-bum and more modem methods, wood extraction for firewood and charcoal, 
and urban expansion are again impacting habitats and faunal communities. Although the effects of 
human activities and habitat alteration on amphibians and reptiles have not yet been assessed in 
Angola, they are known to be important threats for herpetofauna in other parts of Africa and are 
already known to negatively impct bird species in Angola (Ryan et al. 2004; Sekercioglu and Riley 
