Meanwhile, federal scientists in the United States are meeting in St. Louis this week to monitor the situation and figure out how to reverse it.
Several important US amphibian species - boreal toads in the Rocky Mountains and the mountain yellow-legged frog in the Sierra Nevada Mountains - are shrinking in numbers, said zoologist Steve Corn, part of the US Geological Survey’s Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative. The problem is worse in the western United States than in the East.
About one-third of the world’s amphibian species are known to be threatened with extinction, and 159 species have disappeared, a 2008 international study found.
“It’s no fun being a frog,’’ said Stuart Pimm, a prominent biodiversity conservationist from Duke University who was not part of Hof’s study or the USGS effort. “They are getting it from all three different factors.’’
Hof’s study was the first to look at projections of the three threats by geography and see if they overlap. The wide distribution of threats leaves no refuge for amphibians.
The strongest threats seem to be where the most species of amphibians live, concentrating the potential loss of diversity, said Hof and Ross Alford, an amphibian specialist at James Cook University in Australia, who was not part of the research.
The biggest threats are seen, mostly from climate change, to frogs and other amphibians in tropical Africa, northern South America, and the Andes Mountains, areas which Hof calls “climate losers.’’
In the northern Andes, which have the most number of frog species in the world, more than 160 frog species are at risk, he said.
