Ongoing declines for the world’s amphibians in the face of emerging threats

By Jennifer A Luedtke, J. Chanson, Kelsey Neam, Louise Hobin, Adriano O Maciel, A. Catenazzi, Amaël Borzée, Amir Hamidy, A. Aowphol, A. Jean and 113 more. Nature, 2023

650 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Systematic assessments of species extinction risk at regular intervals are necessary for informing conservation action^ 1 , 2 . Ongoing developments in taxonomy, threatening processes and research further underscore the need for reassessment^ 3 , 4 . Here we report the findings of the second Global Amphibian Assessment, evaluating 8,011 species for the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List of Threatened Species. We find that amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate class (40.7% of species are globally threatened). The updated Red List Index shows that the status of amphibians is deteriorating globally, particularly for salamanders and in the Neotropics. Disease and habitat loss drove 91% of status deteriorations between 1980 and 2004. Ongoing and projected climate change effects are now of increasing concern, driving 39% of status deteriorations since 2004, followed by habitat loss (37%). Although signs of species recoveries incentivize immediate conservation action, scaled-up investment is urgently needed to reverse the current trends. The second Global Amphibian Assessment finds that the status of amphibians is continuing to deteriorate globally, driven predominantly by climate change, disease and habitat loss.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Global and Planetary Change, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/5cb13eb3f399864e0da66471e87ee3093476cc7b