Protected areas reduce heat stress in squamates globally

Using biophysical modelling of operative temperatures across 248 squamate reptile species worldwide, we assessed whether individuals inside protected areas experience lower heat exposure than conspecifics in unprotected, human-modified landscapes, and how this buffering effect varies across latitudes, biomes, and evolutionary lineages under current and future climate scenarios (+2 °C and +4 °C).</p><p dir="ltr">The repository includes the sampled locality dataset, modelled heat-stress outputs for all species and scenarios, and the scripts used for spatial sampling, biophysical modelling, statistical analyses, and figure generation.

All raw input data (species ranges, protected area boundaries, climate grids, phylogeny, and trait databases) are publicly available from their original sources, as detailed in the README file.</p>