Abstract
ABSTRACTIn the Republic of Korea, one of the biggest threats to amphibians is habitat modification such as urbanisation and land conversion. With the loss of natural habitats, rice paddies play an important role as substitute habitats for amphibians that originally inhabited wetlands. However, since the 70’s, traditional rice agriculture has been modernised, leading to an increase in the number of concrete ditches and roads bordering rice paddies. This modernisation could have affected the distribution and density of amphibians. In this study, we investigated the preferred position, based on the advertisement calls for two treefrog species (Dryophytes japonicus and D. suweonensis), in relation to different types of borders such as natural ditch, concrete ditch, one-lane dirt road and vegetation. The results show that treefrogs seem to avoid rice paddies with concrete ditches, and with no ditch, which provided no resting microhabitat. The sides of the paddies preferred by the two treefrog species were the ones with vegetation of 30 cm wider or higher, while the two species seemed to avoid the side of paddies with roads. Our results are important for the conservation of anuran species in rice paddies in general as it highlights the need for vegetated areas, preferentially along natural ditches.
Highlights
In fast developing countries, including the Republic of Korea, one of the largest threats to biodiversity is habitat modification, such as urbanisation and land conversion
We investigated the preferred position, based on the advertisement calls for two treefrog species (Dryophytes japonicus and D. suweonensis), in relation to different types of borders such as natural ditch, concrete ditch, one-lane dirt road and vegetation
Treefrogs were more often observed in rice paddies bordered by onelane roads instead of those with no road (74.64% of observed frogs, n = 103; Fisher’s exact test, p = 0.008). Both treefrog species were more commonly found in rice paddies with natural ditches (52.90%, n = 73) and paddies without ditches (36.23%, n = 50), compared to paddies with concrete ditches (10.87%, n = 15; Chisquare test; χ2 = 37.09, df = 2, p < 0.001; Figure 2)
Summary
In fast developing countries, including the Republic of Korea (hereafter Korea), one of the largest threats to biodiversity is habitat modification, such as urbanisation and land conversion. Since the 1970s, the modernisation of agriculture (Ho 1982; Park et al 2005) has changed rice paddies (synonym for rice fields) ecosystem dramatically (Kiritani 2000). In this modernised system in Korea, often the water is pumped into paddy fields via pipes and is drained from fields into deep, U-shaped, concrete ditches in which the water level may be ≥70 cm below the rice paddies. Frog populations decreased because of changes in rice fields’ environments in Japan (Moriyama 1997)
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