Dr. Luke Shoo and a group of amphibian conservation biologists recently published a paper titled "Engineering a future for amphibians under climate change" in the Forum section of the Journal of Applied Ecology. The paper does not present new research, but instead proposes habitat management recommendations for conserving amphibians under conditions of rapidly changing climate. Given that they apply to "amphibians" in the broadest sense, the recommendations are very general. They also entail a rather active level of habitat management, as alluded to by "engineering" in the title.
Among the recommendations is a category of "enhancement and restoration of breeding sites," which, of course, is major component of the rationale for the USC/ESF Vernal Pool Restoration Project. They give a brief summary and assessment of previous efforts to construct or restore amphibian breeding sites, and a few general considerations to improve success. In particular, I was pleased to discover a paper in the journal Hydrobiologia titled "Restoring ponds for amphibians: a success story." The European authors report on an ambitious pool construction and restoration effort in Estonia on behalf of imperiled spadefoot toads and crested newts. Their approach, results, and recommendations are especially relevant to us because of their emphases on building clusters of diverse ponds, and in their explicit consideration of terrestrial habitat conditions.
I agree that such active habitat management recommendations can be helpful in mitigating effects of climate change, but I also suggest that some of them are appropriate for mitigating the more traditional threats to amphibian populations such as habitat loss, emerging infectious diseases, and invasive species. It is surprising that, for the time being, there is such a small number of case studies and success stories in the published literature...
Jim Arrigoni, SUNY ESF
