As cities adopt mandates to protect, maintain and restore urban biodiversity, the need for urban ecology studies grows. Species-specific information on the effects of urbanization is often a limiting factor in designing and implementing effective biodiversity strategies. In suburban and exurban areas, amphibians play an important social-ecological role between people and their environment and contribute to ecosystem health. Amphibians are vulnerable to threats and imbalances in the aquatic and terrestrial environment due to a biphasic lifestyle, making them excellent indicators of local environmental health. We developed a citizen science program to systematically monitor amphibians in a large city in Alberta, Canada, where 90% of pre-settlement wetlands have been removed and human activities continue to degrade, alter, and/or fragment remaining amphibian habitats. We demonstrate successes and challenges of using publicly collected data in biodiversity monitoring. Through amphibian monitoring, we show how a citizen science program improved ecological knowledge, engaged the public in urban biodiversity monitoring and improved urban design and planning for biodiversity. We outline lessons learned to inform citizen science program design, including the importance of early engagement of decision makers, quality control assessment, assessing tensions in program design for data and public engagement goals, and incorporating conservation messaging into programming.
A detailed understanding of the population dynamics of many amphibian species is lacking despite concerns about declining amphibian biodiversity and abundance. This paper explores temporal patterns of occupancy and underlying extinction and colonization dynamics in a regionally imperiled amphibian species, the Northern leopard frog (Lithobates pipiens) in Alberta. Our study contributes to elucidating regional occupancy dynamics at northern latitudes, where climate extremes likely have a profound effect on seasonal occupancy. The primary advantage of our study is its wide geographic scale (60,000 km2) and the use of repeat visual surveys each spring and summer from 2009–2013. We find that occupancy varied more dramatically between seasons than years, with low spring and higher summer occupancy. Between spring and summer, colonization was high and extinction low; inversely, colonization was low and extinction high over the winter. The dynamics of extinction and colonization are complex, making conservation management challenging. Our results reveal that Northern leopard frog occupancy was constant over the last five years and thus there is no evidence of decline or recovery within our study area. Changes to equilibrium occupancy are most sensitive to increasing colonization in the spring or declining extinction in the summer. Therefore, conservation and management efforts should target actions that are likely to increase spring colonization; this could be achieved through translocations or improving the quality or access to breeding habitat. Because summer occupancy is already high, it may be difficult to improve further. Nevertheless, summer extinction could be reduced by predator control, increasing water quality or hydroperiod of wetlands, or increasing the quality or quantity of summer habitat.
. 2014. Asynchronous breeding and variable embryonic development period in the threatened Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens) in the Cypress Hills, Alberta, Canada: conservation and management implications. Canadian Field-Naturalist 128(1): 50 -56. understanding breeding phenology is critical for establishing monitoring strategies, comprehending population dynamics, and developing conservation actions for at-risk species, such as the Northern Leopard Frog (Lithobates pipiens). The timing of spawning and hatching in the Northern Leopard Frog may be highly variable depending on regional environmental conditions, which can make establishing the timing of surveys difficult. In spring 2006, eggs were laid over 30 days (24 April to 23 May) and hatching occurred over 2 weeks (14-28 May) at three neighbouring ponds in Cypress Hills, Alberta, Canada. Although spawning occurred over a month, all eggs hatched within a 2-week period, indicating variable embryo development rate. Among 26 egg masses, eggs laid later in the season developed approximately four times faster than those laid earlier, and Akaike information criterion-ranked models suggested that both Julian date and water temperature were important predictors of embryo development rate: later spawning date and warmer water were associated with faster rates. some egg masses survived colder temperatures than previously reported for this species. Asynchronous breeding and variable development rates reveal the need to conduct multiple surveys over the breeding season, even within a small geographic area, to document reliably the presence of egg masses and identify breeding habitat. Identification of key breeding habitat is necessary to mitigate human-caused disturbances of such regionally imperiled species.
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