Both climate and land-use change have accelerated over the past decades. The cumulative effects of these disruptions are not additive or systematic; rather, they pose complex, dynamic environmental challenges to ecological systems. To survive, terrestrial plants and animals will need to shift their distributions to track habitable regions or exhibit the flexibility to survive these shifting environmental regimes.

Understanding diversity in nature requires not only elucidating the mechanisms that underlie it, but also understanding the fitness consequences of variation. Reptiles and amphibians have unique life histories, but their patterns of aging are under-studied despite the potential to answer unique questions about the evolution of senescence. We take advantage of long-term mark-recapture datasets to untangle the drivers of longevity and rates of aging in these groups.