Abstract
Though a third of amphibian species worldwide are thought to be imperiled, existing assessments simply categorize extinction risk, providing little information on the rate of population losses. We conducted the first analysis of the rate of change in the probability that amphibians occupy ponds and other comparable habitat features across the United States. We found that overall occupancy by amphibians declined 3.7% annually from 2002 to 2011. Species that are Red-listed by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) declined an average of 11.6% annually. All subsets of data examined had a declining trend including species in the IUCN Least Concern category. This analysis suggests that amphibian declines may be more widespread and severe than previously realized.
Highlights
Amphibians have received increasing attention since a crisis of declining populations was first recognized in the late 1980s [1,2,3]
The current extinction rate for amphibians has been estimated to be 211 times the background rate [5]. These numbers indicate that many species have conservation problems but they do not reveal the rate of population loss
These occupancy estimates span a broad range of habitats, geographic areas (Figure 1A), and species including International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) categories ranging from Endangered to Least Concern (Figure 1B)
Summary
Amphibians have received increasing attention since a crisis of declining populations was first recognized in the late 1980s [1,2,3]. We use data from the U.S Geological Survey’s Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative (ARMI) to estimate the rate of change in the probability that amphibians occupy ponds and other comparable habitat features across the United States. The occupancy estimates produced by ARMI are statistically unbiased because they use repeated surveys to account statistically for the probability of detecting a species that is present [7].
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