Abstract
The amphibian database of the Centre for Wildlife Studies of Kerala Agricultural University has the data that are either available as voucher specimens with the Kerala Agricultural University Natural History Museum (KAUNHM) or as photo vouchers and other opportunistic records from Kerala part of the southern Western Ghats between 2008 and 2020. This repository holds information on 91 species of amphibians belonging to 10 families, of which 87% are endemic to the Western Ghats and 34% are classified under the IUCN Red List threatened categories. This study highlights the significance of such digital databases that can serve as an immense source of regional biodiversity data, and therefore, biodiversity monitoring and conservation.
Highlights
Among the vertebrates in the world, amphibians are the most threatened taxa and have the highest proportion of species on the verge of extinction (Baillie et al 2004; Roelants et al 2007)
There are three types of observations recorded in the amphibian database of Kerala Agricultural University Natural Histiry Museum (KAUNHM): (i)voucher specimens are wet preserved in 70% alcohol, (ii) amphibian photo-vouchers from within and outside the protected areas/reserve forests of Kerala, and (iii) opportunistic records of amphibians from across the state
The amphibian database of the Kerala Agricultural University Natural Histiry Museum (KAUNHM) has information on 91 species which is around 50.3% of amphibians of Kerala, of which 79 species are endemic to the Western Ghats and 31 species come under various threatened categories of IUCN (Table 1)
Summary
Among the vertebrates in the world, amphibians are the most threatened taxa and have the highest proportion of species on the verge of extinction (Baillie et al 2004; Roelants et al 2007). Biju (2001), after his seven-year fieldwork, published an eye-opening article that indicated the presence of several unidentified anuran amphibian species from the Western Ghats. This was one of the primary evidence for the untapped and unexplored biological wealth of a megadiverse country. Within a span of five years, 30 new species have been added to the checklist of amphibians of Kerala (Abraham et al 2015; Dinesh et al 2015; Howlader et al 2015; Dahanukar et al 2016; Garg & Biju 2017, 2019; Garg et al 2017, 2019; Krutha et al 2017; Joshy et al 2009; Vijayakumar et al 2019). Documentation of amphibians is extremely important to win the Linnean shortfall which is considered as a basic flaw in biodiversity data (Hortal et al 2015; Ficetola et al 2019)
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