Natural resource managers are increasingly faced with threats to managed ecosystems that are largely outside of their control. Examples include land development, climate change, invasive species, and emerging infectious diseases. All of these are characterized by large uncertainties in timing, magnitude, and effects on species. In many cases, the conservation of species will only be possible through concerted action on the limited elements of the system that managers can control. However, before an action is taken, a manager must decide how to act, which is ? if done well ? not easy. In addition to dealing with uncertainty, managers must balance multiple potentially competing objectives, often in cases when the management actions available to them are limited. Guidance in making these types of challenging decisions can be found in the practice known as decision analysis. We demonstrate how using a decision-analytic approach to frame decisions can help identify and address impediments to improved conservation decision making. We demonstrate the application of decision analysis to two high-elevation amphibian species. An inadequate focus on the decision-making process, and an assumption that scientific information is adequate to solve conservation problems, must be overcome to advance the conservation of amphibians and other highly threatened taxa.

Species with narrow environmental preferences are often distributed across fragmented patches of suitable habitat, and dispersal among subpopulations can be difficult to directly observe. Genetic data collected at population centers can help quantify gene flow, which is especially important for vulnerable species with a disjunct range. Plethodon shenandoah is a Federally Endangered salamander known only from three mountaintops in Virginia, USA. To reconstruct the evolutionary history and population connectivity of this species, we generated both mitochondrial and nuclear data using sequence capture for all three populations and found strong population structure that was independent of geographic distance. Both the nuclear markers and mitochondrial genome indicated a deep split between the most southern population and the combined central and northern population. Although there was some mitochondrial haplotype-splitting between the central and northern populations, there was complete admixture in nuclear markers. This is indicative of either a recent split or current male-biased dispersal among mountain isolates. Models of landscape resistance found that dispersal across north-facing slopes at mid-elevation levels best explain the observed genetic structure among populations. These unexpected results highlight the importance of landscape features in understanding and predicting movement and fragmentation of salamanders across space.

To better understand relations of annual calling phenophases for Pseudacris crucifer, and of the first calls of the season for Hyla chrysoscelis/versicolor, to the timing of the start of the calling season, we compared these dynamics for six wetlands in the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway from 2008 to 2012. We installed an acoustic recorder at each site prior to the start of each calling season and programmed it to record for five minutes at the top of every hour until late summer. We then used the Songscape option in Songscope software to generate annual summaries of all acoustic files recorded at each site. We created contour plots of the summarized median dB values across bandwidths in each recording and then assessed individual calls and calling peaks by visually examining these plots to identify first (and last) calls via the unique call signatures for these two species. We examined individual five-minute recordings aurally and visually as necessary when sound images represented on the contour plots were confounded and to ensure that the calling peaks described below were dates when calling activity was relatively intense. We also determined the daily median dB levels for frequencies across 2900 to 3200 Hz during 2100 to 2300 h, the bandwidth that typically encompassed the primary energy peak in P. crucifer calls and a time period during which P. crucifer typically called most consistently throughout their calling season. We did this for each day from the date when P. crucifer first called during each year to the date when they last called during each year. Because calling activity could vary from one hour to the next, we integrated the area under the curve for the daily median dB levels from 2900 to 3200 Hz during 2100 to 2300 h. We removed dates when overlapping sounds from storms or other sources rendered comparisons to calls of P. crucifer inaccurate. We used the resultant set of integrands to represent the relative sound intensity (as an indicator of calling activity) for P. crucifer across those hours for each date. We then used these integrands to determine the three highest peak calling dates for this species and used the median of those three dates as the overall median peak date for each site in each year.