Abstract
Habitat loss, climate change, over-exploitation, disease and other factors have been hypothesised in the global decline of amphibian biodiversity. However, the relative importance of and synergies among different drivers are still poorly understood. We present the largest global analysis of roughly 45% of known amphibians (2,583 species) to quantify the influences of life history, climate, human density and habitat loss on declines and extinction risk. Multi-model Bayesian inference reveals that large amphibian species with small geographic range and pronounced seasonality in temperature and precipitation are most likely to be Red-Listed by IUCN. Elevated habitat loss and human densities are also correlated with high threat risk. Range size, habitat loss and more extreme seasonality in precipitation contributed to decline risk in the 2,454 species that declined between 1980 and 2004, compared to species that were stable (n = 1,545) or had increased (n = 28). These empirical results show that amphibian species with restricted ranges should be urgently targeted for conservation.
Highlights
Amphibians epitomise the modern biodiversity crisis, having exhibited major population declines, disease susceptibility, morphological deformities, and well-publicized recent extinctions [1,2]
We excluded those species categorized on the basis of geographic range (IUCN ‘‘B’’ criteria) and used the remaining 2,494–3,052 amphibian species for our analysis
The highest-ranked generalized linear mixed-effect model (GLMM) based on the reduced dataset, when re-parameterized as a simple generalized linear model (GLM), revealed a %DE of 44.69%
Summary
Amphibians epitomise the modern biodiversity crisis, having exhibited major population declines, disease susceptibility, morphological deformities, and well-publicized recent extinctions [1,2]. Various threats to amphibians (e.g., global warming, habitat loss, disease vulnerability to chytrid fungus, and pollution) have been identified [4,5,6,7], large-scale analyses of extinction risk in amphibians have been few [8].
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