Global warming affects how organisms interact with each other and with the environment they inhabit. The ability of organisms to compensate for climate change highly depends on the ability of other species to make similar compensations. Hence, we need to look beyond single-species studies and ask how a species depends on other species for survival, especially where some of the other species are predicted to decline under climate change. To fill this gap, we quantify how lizard’s physiology is affected by the availability of vegetation cover and insect abundance in a desert community. In particular, we studied a desert lizard (““Messalina bahaeldini”“) and its interactions with the local vegetation, which inhabits the Judean desert in Israel. First, we used a drone to map the vegetation cover in two study areas at a resolution of 3 cm. Next, we collected 81 lizards, measured their fat mass using Dual Energy X-ray Absorptiometry (DEXA), and calculated the percentage of vegetation cover around the collection coordinate of each lizard. Finally, we tested how fat mass is affected by vegetation cover at different radii (1-100m) from the lizard, and by the Julian day. We found that vegetation cover within a 10m radius from each lizard is the best predictor for lizards’ fat mass, compared to other radii. Specifically, the fat mass increased with vegetation cover, particularly during the summer. Incorporating the results of the model with other levels of interactions (such as prey abundance) will enable us to estimate the importance of the stability of such ecological interactions in the desert system of lizards and better predict the biological impacts of climate change.