Climate change and amphibians

By P. S. Corn. Animal Biodiversity and Conservation, 2005

197 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Amphibian life histories are exceedingly sensitive to temperature and precipitation, and there is good evidence that recent climate change has already resulted in a shift to breeding earlier in the year for some species. There are also suggestions that the recent increase in the occurrence of El Niño events has caused declines of anurans in Central America and is linked to elevated mortality of amphibian embryos in the northwestern United States. However, evidence linking amphibian declines in Central America to climate relies solely on correlations, and the mechanisms underlying the declines are not understood. Connections between embryo mortality and declines in abundance have not been demonstrated. Analyses of existing data have generally failed to find a link between climate and amphibian declines. It is likely, however, that future climate change will cause further declines of some amphibian species. Reduced soil moisture could reduce prey species and eliminate habitat. Reduced snowfall and increased summer evaporation could have dramatic effects on the duration or occurrence of seasonal wetlands, which are primary habitat for many species of amphibians. Climate change may be a relatively minor cause of current amphibian declines, but it may be the biggest future challenge to the persistence of many species.

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

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f302bea6334a37c51656819d11ebec292ba4a247

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Citations in the corpus

Engineering a future for amphibians under climate change (2011, background): “Climate change will be likely to exacerbate most of these threats and will pose major new challenges for conservation practitioners in the coming century (Corn 2005; Blaustein et al. 2010).”
Climate warming and the decline of amphibians and reptiles in Europe (2006, background): “Climate change is amongst the many hypotheses postulated to explain these declines (Alford & Richards, 1999; Gibbons et al., 2000; Kiesecker et al., 2001; Carey & Alexander, 2003; Collins & Storfer, 2003; Corn, 2005).”