Interactions between reptiles and people: A perspective from wildlife rehabilitation records

As urbanisation expands globally, human–wildlife interactions will inevitably increase. Here, we analysed 10 years of wildlife rehabilitation records of squamate (snake and lizard) reptiles (n = 37,075) from the Greater Sydney region, New South Wales, Australia to explore their value to address management and conservation issues. Rescues were highly non-random regarding taxonomic focus, spatial occurrences and temporal trends due to the combined influence of (a) reptile phenology and behaviour, and (b) human perceptions of reptiles. Seasonal peaks in rescues reflect reptile, and to a lesser extent, human activity. Spatial patterns of rescues were informative about distributions and presence of easily identified taxa but were primarily driven by human presence. Larger squamate species were rescued more frequently, potentially reflecting a perception of greater danger or rescue priority. While uncommon species were often misidentified, accurate reports of these taxa may guide targeted surveys. The value of these data for conservation and management could be enhanced by emphasising reptile identification training of volunteers and use of applications for informed species identification. Wildlife rehabilitation data offer a cost-effective means of quantifying thousands of human–reptile interactions, identifying foci (in both time and space) of human–wildlife conflict, such as snakebite risk and roadkill-related reptile mortality.

Methods
The data associated with this manuscript are reptile rehabilitation records collected by 17 wildlife rehabilitation providers opperating in Greater Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Data were provided to Prof. Rick Shine and Dr. Chris Jolly by NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service via a research agreement provided by the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. The orginal data were over 100,000 records collected in state of NSW between 2011–2021. We filtered these data for only recorded in the Greater Sydney region. We then filtered them for only records of terrestrial squamate records identified to species-level. We also filtered out species not local to the region (either misidentification or escaped pets).