Abstract
Although there is growing concern that amphibian populations are declining globally1,2,3, much of the supporting evidence is either anecdotal4,5 or derived from short-term studies at small geographical scales6,7,8. This raises questions not only about the difficulty of detecting temporal trends in populations which are notoriously variable9,10, but also about the validity of inferring global trends from local or regional studies11,12. Here we use data from 936 populations to assess large-scale temporal and spatial variations in amphibian population trends. On a global scale, our results indicate relatively rapid declines from the late 1950s/early 1960s to the late 1960s, followed by a reduced rate of decline to the present. Amphibian population trends during the 1960s were negative in western Europe (including the United Kingdom) and North America, but only the latter populations showed declines from the 1970s to the late 1990s. These results suggest that while large-scale trends show considerable geographical and temporal variability, amphibian populations are in fact declining—and that this decline has been happening for several decades.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all the researchers who contributed amphibian population data and, in particular, J. Loman, T. Beebee and S. Zumbach for large unpublished data sets. This work was supported by Wildlife Habitat Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Schweizerischer Nationalfonds.
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41586_2000_BF35008052_MOESM1_ESM.doc
Supporting documentation of the 936 amphibian population time series used in 'Quantitative evidence for global amphibian population declines'. (DOC 97 kb)
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Houlahan, J., Findlay, C., Schmidt, B. et al. Quantitative evidence for global amphibian population declines. Nature 404, 752–755 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35008052
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35008052
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