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AMPHIBIAN POPULATION DYNAMICS
Citation:
RUSTIGIAN, H. L., M. SANTELMANN, AND N. H. SCHUMAKER. AMPHIBIAN POPULATION DYNAMICS. Chapter 10, From the Corn Belt to the Gulf - Societal and Environmental Implications of Alternative Agricultural Futures. Resources for the Future, Washington, DC, DC, , 108-114, (2007).
Impact/Purpose:
book chapter
Description:
Agriculture has contributed to loss of vertebrate biodiversity in many regions, including the U.S. Corn Belt. Amphibian populations, in particular, have experienced widespread and often inexplicable declines, range reductions, and extinctions. However, few attempts have been made to model amphibian population dynamics, and even fewer have been spatially explicit or considered landscape complementation and climatic variability. The paucity of life history and dispersal data for most amphibian species makes model parameterization difficult. Many species require both aquatic and terrestrial habitats and are thus limited to areas where there is both sufficient moisture for reproduction and survival, and access to adjacent terrestrial habitats. Climatic variability is also an important component of amphibian population dynamics in the Midwest. Northern prairie wetlands undergo a 10 to 20 year wet-dry cycle, resulting in two to three year droughts. Droughts have been linked to suppressed amphibian reproductive activity, decreased reproductive success, localized extinctions and population declines. For these reasons, models ncorporating both climatic variation and landscape complementation are useful in the simulation of amphibian population dynamics. The present study applies a spatially explicit population model to evaluate future landscape scenarios for their potential impacts on population dynamics of four amphibian species in two agricultural watersheds in central Iowa, including considerations of climatic variability and habitat complementation.
