Declining amphibian populations: a global phenomenon in conservation biology

By T. Gardner. Animal Biodiversity and Conservation, 2001

143 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The majority of the recent reductions in the Earth’s biodiversity can be attributed to direct human impacts on the environment. An increasing number of studies over the last decade have reported declines in amphibian populations in areas of pristine habitat. Such reports suggest the role of indirect factors and a global effect of human activities on natural systems. Declines in amphibian populations bear significant implications for the functioning of many terrestrial ecosystems, and may signify important implications for human welfare. A wide range of candidates have been proposed to explain amphibian population declines. However, it seems likely that the relevance of each factor is dependent upon the habitat type and species in question, and that complex synergistic effects between a number of environmental factors is of critical importance. Monitoring of amphibian populations to assess the extent and cause of declines is confounded by a number of ecological and methodological limitations.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Global and Planetary Change

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/03652945b063c92175b3c041efbf8c5971c0c1d9

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Citations in the corpus

The recent decline of a New Zealand endemic: how and why did populations of Archey's frog Leiopelma archeyi crash over 1996–2001? (2004, background): “In order to elucidate real declines from stochastic fluctuations, Gardner (2001) notes that a long time series is highly desirable, although few studies are longer than five years, and even fewer are more than 10 (Alford and Richards, 1999; Houlahan et al., 2000; Marsh, 2001; Young et al., 2001).”
Atrazine-induced hermaphroditism at 0.1 ppb in American leopard frogs (Rana pipiens): laboratory and field evidence. (2002, background): “Many amphibian species are in decline (Blaustein and Kiesecker 2002; Gardner 2001; Wake 1991), and R. pipiens populations are declining in many locations in Indiana and Illinois.”
Conservation Biology of Caecilian Amphibians (2005, background): “Habitat destruction plays a primary role in declining populations of other amphibians, but other biotic and abiotic factors are also important (e.g., Gardner 2001; Blaustein & Kiesecker 2002; Blaustein et al. 2003; Collins & Storfer 2003; Daszak et al. 2003), including climate change (Thomas et al.…”
Impacts of habitat loss and restoration on amphibian populations (2009, background): “For establishing such relationships, large spatial scales should be involved (Ovaskainen and Hanski 2003) and long-term data are required to separate the deterministic response of population to habitat loss from annual fluctuations (Pechmann et al. 1991, Gardner 2001, Marsh 2001).”