Although many large mammals currently face significant threats that could lead to their extinction, resources for conservation are often scarce, resulting in the need to develop efficient plans to prioritize conservation actions. We combined several methods in spatial ecology to identify the distribution of the endangered Baird's tapir across its range from southern Mexico to northern Colombia. Twenty-eight habitat patches covering 23% of the study area were identified, harboring potentially 62% or more of the total population for this flagship species. Roughly half of the total area is under some form of protection, while most of the remaining habitat (~70%) occurs in indigenous/local communities. The network with maximum connectivity created from these patches contains at least one complete break (in Mexico between Selva El Ocote and Selva Lacandona) even when considering the most generous dispersal scenario. The connectivity analysis also highlighted a probable break at the Panama Canal and high habitat fragmentation in Honduras. In light of these findings, we recommend the following actions to facilitate the conservation of Baird's tapir: 1) protect existing habitat by strengthening enforcement in areas already under protection, 2) work with indigenous territories to preserve and enforce their land rights, and help local communities maintain traditional practices; 3) re-establish connections between habitat patches that will allow for connectivity across the species' distribution; 4) conduct additional noninvasive surveys in patches with little or no species data; and 5) collect more telemetry and genetic data on the species to estimate home range size, dispersal capabilities, and meta-population structure.

Effective and targeted conservation action requires detailed information about species, their distribution, systematics and ecology as well as the distribution of threat processes which affect them. Knowledge of reptilian diversity remains surprisingly disparate, and innovative means of gaining rapid insight into the status of reptiles are needed in order to highlight urgent conservation cases and inform environmental policy with appropriate biodiversity information in a timely manner. We present the first ever global analysis of extinction risk in reptiles, based on a random representative sample of 1500 species (16% of all currently known species). To our knowledge, our results provide the first analysis of the global conservation status and distribution patterns of reptiles and the threats affecting them, highlighting conservation priorities and knowledge gaps which need to be addressed urgently to ensure the continued survival of the world’s reptiles. Nearly one in five reptilian species are threatened with extinction, with another one in five species classed as Data Deficient. The proportion of threatened reptile species is highest in freshwater environments, tropical regions and on oceanic islands, while data deficiency was highest in tropical areas, such as Central Africa and Southeast Asia, and among fossorial reptiles. Our results emphasise the need for research attention to be focussed on tropical areas which are experiencing the most dramatic rates of habitat loss, on fossorial reptiles for which there is a chronic lack of data, and on certain taxa such as snakes for which extinction risk may currently be underestimated due to lack of population information. Conservation actions specifically need to mitigate the effects of human-induced habitat loss and harvesting, which are the predominant threats to reptiles.