Very excited to have you visiting at @creaf.cat @macgregorfors.bsky.social !!

This work was brilliantly led by Marc Vez-Garzón (@marcvez.bsky.social‬), Sandra Moreno and Guillem Casbas.

Strategic urban planning is vital to preserve these relict Ibiza wall lizard populations. Citizen science enhanced our capacity to monitor the invasion across large areas, providing real-time data that can inform adaptive management and help preserve this iconic, keystone Mediterranean species.

We run simulations that rule out the possibility that urban areas act merely as “ecological traps” where populations cannot persist without immigration. Under low anthropogenic mortality, invaded urban populations are self-sustaining.

Urban areas seem to act as an ecological filter for snakes:
🚗 Traffic is an effective barrier for snakes to colonize urban areas, 👩‍👩‍👧‍👦 humans actively detect and remove snakes more often, while urban microhabitats 🏡 (rock walls, gardens, parks) provide favorable conditions for Ibiza wall lizards.

To study the persistence of urban lizard populations, we surveyed 144 urban and peri-urban sites across the island. Although invasive snakes strongly reduce lizard abundance, lizards persist well in intensively urbanized long-invaded areas