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Increasing temperatures and climate-driven disturbances like wildfire are a growing threat to many species,
including cold-water specialists. Montane areas and cold streams are often considered climate refugia that buffer
communities against change. However, climate refugia are often species-specific, and despite growing awareness
that...

Protected areas like national parks are essential elements of conservation because they limit human influence on the landscape, which protects biodiversity and ecosystem function. The role of national parks in conservation, however, often goes far beyond limiting human influence. The U.S. National Park Service and its system of land units...

In many parts of the world, the combined effects of habitat fragmentation and altered disturbance regimes pose a significant threat to biodiversity. This is particularly true in Mediterranean-type ecosystems (MTEs), which tend to be fire-prone, species rich, and heavily impacted by human land use. Given the spatial complexity of overlapping...

Although wildfire plays an important role in maintaining biodiversity in many ecosystems, fire management to protect human assets is often carried out by different agencies than those tasked for conserving biodiversity. In fact, fire risk reduction and biodiversity conservation are often viewed as competing objectives. Here we explored the role of...

Drought has fueled an increased frequency and severity of large wildfires in many ecosystems. Despite an increase in research on wildfire effects on vertebrates, the vast majority of it has focused on short-term (<5 yrs) effects and there is still little information on the time scale of population recovery for species that decline in abundance...

Most research on the effects of wildfires on water quality in streams has focused on suspended sediment and nutrients in streams and water bodies, and relatively little research has examined the effects of wildfires on trace elements. The purpose of this study was two-fold: 1) to determine the effect of the 2009 Station Fire in the Angeles...

Populations forming the edge of a species range are often imperiled by isolation and low genetic diversity, with proximity to human population centers being a major determinant of edge stability in modern landscapes. Since the 1960s, the California red-legged frog (Rana draytonii) has undergone extensive declines in urban-plagued southern...

We conducted surveys for the endangered Sierra Madre yellow-legged frog (Rana muscosa) throughout southern California to evaluate their current distribution and status. Surveys were conducted between 2000 and 2009 at 150 unique streams and lakes within the San Gabriel, San Bernardino, San Jacinto, and Palomar mountains of southern...

Disturbances are often expected to magnify effects of disease, but these effects may depend on the ecology, behavior, and life history of both hosts and pathogens. In many ecosystems, wildfire is the dominant natural disturbance and thus could directly or indirectly affect dynamics of many diseases. To determine how probability of infection by the...

Projected increases in wildfire and other climate-driven disturbances will affect
populations and communities worldwide, including host–parasite relationships. Research in
temperate forests has shown that wildfire can negatively affect amphibians, but this research
has occurred primarily outside of managed landscapes where interactions...

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency and severity of drought and wildfire. Aquatic and moisture-sensitive species, such as amphibians, may be particularly vulnerable to these modified disturbance regimes because large wildfires often occur during extended droughts and thus may compound environmental threats. However, understanding...

Studies of the distribution of elusive forest wildlife have suffered from the confounding of true presence with the uncertainty of detection. Occupancy modeling, which incorporates probabilities of species detection conditional on presence, is an emerging approach for reducing observation bias. However, the current likelihood modeling framework is...

Severe population declines led to the listing of southern California Rana muscosa (Ranidae) as endangered in 2002. Nine small populations inhabit watersheds in three isolated mountain ranges, the San Gabriel, San Bernardino and San Jacinto. One population from the Dark Canyon tributary in the San Jacinto Mountains has been used to...

There have been documented decreases in B. boreas populations throughout Glacier National Park, but the causes are not as of yet fully understood. These toads breed preferentially in small, shallow ponds located at high elevations. Due to the high elevations, one potential cause of decline is that is currently being studied is increased...

In 2003, southern California experienced several large fires that burned thousands of hectares of wildlife habitats and conserved lands. To investigate the effects of these fires on the reptile and
amphibian communities, we compared the results from prefire herpetofauna and vegetation sampling to two years of postfire sampling across 38 burned...

Information on amphibian responses to fire and fuel reduction practices is critically needed due to potential declines of species and the prevalence of new, more intensive fire management practices in North American forests. The goals of this review are to summarize the known and potential effects of fire and fuels management on amphibians and...

Disturbance has long been a central issue in amphibian conservation, often regarding negative effects of logging or other forest management activities, but some amphibians seem to prefer disturbed habitats. After documenting increased use of recently burned forests by boreal toads (Bufo boreas), we hypothesized that burned habitats...

Wildfire is a potential threat to many species with narrow environmental tolerances, including the Rocky Mountain Tailed Frog (Ascaphus montanus Mittleman and Myers, 1949), which inhabits a region where the frequency and intensity of wildfires is expected to increase. We compared pre- and post-fire counts of tadpoles in 8 streams in...

Disturbances can significantly affect the thermal regime and community structure of wetlands. We investigated the effect of a wildfire on water temperature of seasonal, montane wetlands after documenting the colonization of recently burned wetlands by the Boreal Toad (Bufo boreas boreas). We compared the daily mean temperature, daily...