Management

Only a few years ago, amphibians were rarely considered in the development and implementation of management plans. But now, it's not uncommon to see amphibian populations as the primary targets of management activities.

ARMI scientists conduct research on the impacts of various traditional management actions on amphibians, and have worked with partners to develop and test novel management options specifically to benefit amphibians.

Important decisions are made every day on management and policy that affect multiple wildlife species. ARMI works with its partners in Federal and State agencies to develop processes for structuring their natural resource decisions to achieve their conservation objectives related to amphibians.

Vernal pool
Larissa Bailey (Colorado State), USGS, FWS, and SCC volunteers building vernal pools at Patuxent NWR, to adaptively manage for climate change. Photo by: A. Green.

Management - ARMI Papers & Reports

Papers & Reports Comments on: “Rewilding a vanishing taxon–Restoring aquatic ecosystems using amphibians”. Stark and Schwarz 2024. Biological Conservation 292, 110559
Authors: Erin Muths; Benedikt R Schmidt; Evan HC Grant
Date: 2025-01 | Outlet: Biological Conservation
This is a brief response to an article about using amphibians as part of rewilding programs, that points out some flaws in the presentation of ideas in that article.
Papers & Reports Using life history traits to assess climate change vulnerability in understudied species
Authors: Ross K Hinderer; Blake R Hossack; Lisa A Eby
Outlet: Integrative Zoology
Climate change is a primary threat to biodiversity, but for many species, we still lack information required to assess their relative vulnerability to changes. Climate change vulnerability assessment (CCVA) is a widely used technique to rank relative vulnerability to climate change based on species characteristics, such as their distributions, habitat associations, environmental tolerances, and life-history traits. However, for species that we expect are vulnerable to climate change yet are understudied, like many amphibians, we often lack information required to construct CCVAs using existing methods. We used the CCVA framework to construct trait-based models based on life history theory, using empirical evidence of traits and distributions that reflected sensitivity of amphibians to environmental perturbation. We performed CCVAs for amphibians in 7 states in the north-central USA, focusing on 31 aquatic-breeding species listed as species of greatest conservation need by at last 1 state. Because detailed information on habitat requirements is unavailable for most amphibian species, we used species distributions and information on traits expected to influence vulnerability to a drying climate (e.g., clutch size and habitat breadth). We scored species vulnerability based on changes projected for mid-century (2040?2069) from 2 climate models representing “least-dry” and “most-dry” scenarios for the region. Species characteristics useful for discriminating vulnerability in our models included small range size, small clutch size, inflexible diel activity patterns, and smaller habitat breadth. When projected climate scenarios included a mix of drier and wetter conditions in the future, the exposure of a species to drying conditions was most important to relative rankings. When the scenario was universally drier, species characteristics were more important to relative rankings. Using information typically available even for understudied species and a range of climate projections, our results highlight the potential of using life history traits as indicators of relative climate vulnerability. The commonalities we identified provide a framework that can be used to assess other understudied species threatened by climate change.
Papers & Reports Unburned habitat essential for amphibian breeding persistence following wildfire.
Authors: Larissa L Bailey; Richard Henderson; Wendy A Estes-Zumpf; Charles Rhoades; Ellie Miller; Dominique Lujan; Erin Muths
Date: 2025 | Outlet: Global Ecology and Conservation, 57, p.e03389.
Wildfire regimes are changing rapidly with widespread increase in the intensity, frequency, and duration of fire activity, especially in the western United States. Limited studies explore the impacts of wildfires on aquatic taxa and few focus on lentic habitats that are essential for amphibians, many of which are of conservation concern. We capitalized on existing pre-fire surveys for anuran species and resurveyed a random subset of wetlands across a gradient of soil burn severity to investigate the short-term effects of wildfire on a relict population of wood frogs in the southern Rocky Mountains. We also investigated whether maps created to support rapid post-fire emergency response activities (i.e., USFS BAER program) accurately characterize soil burn severity around small habitat features (i.e., ponds) that serve as important amphibian breeding and rearing habitat. We found that wood frog breeding persistence following fires was strongly influenced by the percentage of their terrestrial habitat (100m buffer surrounding breeding ponds) that was burned. Wood frog colonization probability of previously unoccupied ponds was low (~ 0.10) and unaffected by soil burn severity. Importantly, we found that remotely sensed data typically produced to predict flooding and erosion at broad (catchment) scales is a poor representation of the amount and variation in soil burn severity surrounding small habitat features (e.g., ponds), suggesting that additional field sampling is necessary to understand wildfire responses for species that rely on small habitat features. Understanding short-term geographic- and species-specific variation in response to wildfires provides the basis to explore time to recovery (e.g., when wood frogs return to burned breeding sites) or to determine if declines in breeding distributions intensify over time.
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