USGS National Amphibian Leadership Meeting
Gainesville, Florida, February 1-4, 2000
Findings and Recommendations

1. The Need for a Framework

1.1 In response to alarming indications of worldwide declines in amphibian populations, the President and the Congress in Fiscal Year 2000 directed Interior Department agencies to initiate a national program of amphibian monitoring, research and conservation. Measuring, understanding and responding to the effects of environmental change upon the Nation's amphibians is a daunting task that cannot be done by any agency acting alone. For success there must be effective cooperation within the Department and with other organizations, agencies, academic scientists, and particularly the States, which have primary responsibility for the conservation of amphibians.

1.2 The USGS is uniquely qualified to develop and provide scientific leadership for such an effort. It serves as the research arm of the Department of the Interior, which is responsible for management of vast expanses of the Nation's land mass and significant biological resources. It has a long history of employing research scientists who have pioneered studies on amphibian sampling techniques, toxicology, and health-related issues, and it has a nationwide organization that oversees other national monitoring programs. Nevertheless, the USGS does not have the financial resources or the people to operate the programs needed without the help of other agencies and organizations. It can, however, provide the leadership and coordination needed to accomplish this task by developing a framework that will enlist and facilitate the cooperation of others. 

1.3 Such a framework will enhance the efforts of Federal agencies, States, and others to provide high quality comparable information on the status of the Nation's amphibians and the forces affecting them. This broad national view will simultaneously provide a basis by which changes at the level of the State, the park, or the refuge can be understood in light of changes at regional and national levels.

1.4 Amphibian declines are associated with multiple stresses including habitat loss and degradation, invasive species, contaminants, disease outbreaks, climate change, and altered patterns of disturbance. Thus, the amphibian monitoring and research program must coordinate activities of many ongoing and expanding research programs by the USGS and others on multiple stressors.

2. Design of the Framework and Roles of Partners

2.1 The pyramid model (Figure 1) modified from the 1997 Committee on Natural Resources and the Environment (CENR) report "Integrating the Nation's Environmental Monitoring and Research Networks and Programs: A Proposed Framework" is an appropriate model for the USGS to offer leadership in amphibian monitoring and research.

2.2 The framework can be conceptualized as a pyramid with extensive and necessarily coarse measurements at many sites across the country (the base of the pyramid), intensive research efforts at a relatively small number of sites throughout the country (the top of the pyramid), and mid-level efforts at a moderate number of sites to provide a regional perspective on the status of amphibians (the middle portions of the pyramid).

2.2.1 The States, aided by other agencies and organizations, should have the primary role in extensive monitoring, conducting inventories and developing information on broad-scale trends known through remote sensing. USGS will aid in this effort by providing a geographic framework for analysis and web-based access to data.

2.2.2 Surveys of species of special concern will be the primary responsibilities of State and Federal resource management agencies, aided by non-governmental organizations and others as possible. The USGS will cooperate and communicate with these entities to ensure that information they collect can be effectively integrated into the framework.

2.2.3 One key role of USGS consists of intensive interdisciplinary monitoring and research at "index sites".  Other important USGS efforts will include developing methods and protocols for use nationwide, managing and providing access to data, and modeling and synthesizing findings across all regions and all levels of the framework.

2.3 Index sites will be in PRIMENet National Parks, larger National Wildlife Refuges, and other sites that have historical data or in which data are being collected for other monitoring programs.

2.4 The intensive sites operated by USGS on Interior lands cannot fully represent the Nation or its regions, but may be able to detect large-scale trends and provide a broad context in which resource surveys from other sites can be interpreted. One challenge for the USGS is synthesizing data across broad geographic areas and determining the extent to which findings can be extrapolated from routinely sampled areas to other areas.

3. Building Partnerships

3.1 A major challenge in implementing the framework will be communication with and support of the organizations that are, or are capable of, conducting extensive surveys and monitoring.

3.2 USGS will support these organizations by providing:

3.2.1 A framework that will increase the interpretive value of their monitoring results
3.2.2 Specialized physical science and information management expertise
3.2.3 State-of the-art monitoring protocols
3.2.4 Field guides, training to help with species and habitat identification
3.2.5 Broad access to data from all components of the program
3.2.6 Map and web-based products and information
3.2.7 Analysis and synthesis of data and information
3.2.8 Matching funds to encourage program initiation

3.3 The North American Amphibian Monitoring Program (NAAMP) does some things very well, particularly in its interface with the Public. The broader framework and NAAMP should be closely linked, with the NAAMP website providing a gateway to the national program.

3.4 The USGS should strive to work closely with National Park Service, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Bureau of Land Management biologists with the goal of integrating its programs with ongoing inventory and monitoring efforts that include amphibians.

3.5 USGS should seek to work closely with related organizations and partnerships, including Partners for Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC) and the IUCN Declining Amphibian Populations Task Force (DAPTF).

3.6 Effective regional coordinators are essential to the success of the program through their activities in training, communicating with other Federal agencies, establishing partnerships with States, and developing specialized protocols and regional syntheses.

4. Recommended Attributes of the Framework

4.1 Monitoring and research supported by the initiative will be closely integrated to support development and validation of protocols and investigation of mechanisms of change suggested by monitoring results.

4.2 Modeling and research will seek to provide linkages among components and integration across spatial scales in the framework.

4.3 Quality Assurance and Quality Control (QA/QC) mechanisms will be clearly defined in all phases of the program. Field protocols will give particular attention to unintended negative effects of survey activities on populations.

4.4 Surveillance of diseases and malformations, and epidemiological studies will be supported and closely integrated into the framework.

4.5 The national framework must accommodate differences in protocols, methodologies and approaches necessitated by differences in habitats and life cycles. Although exact methods need not be uniform across the nation, the framework design and a core set of variables must ensure that data from all sources can be compared across dimensions of space and time.

4.6 Peer review of protocols, reports, and syntheses must be integral parts of the program and the program as a whole should be subject to periodic comprehensive review to ensure quality and responsiveness to national needs.

4.7 Findings from programs within the framework will be aggregated across ecological regions, but may be reported on the basis of political boundaries as necessary.

5. Implementation

5.1 USGS will task a national steering committee of scientists representing a range of disciplines to provide technical oversight, ensuring that monitoring and research activities within the framework will lead to a coherent assessment of the status and trends of amphibian populations.

5.2 The steering committee will form teams comprised of statisticians, including those experienced in spatial statistics, quantitative biologists, and physical and information scientists to select protocols, develop lists of core variables, develop metadata that include sources of error and bias, specify appropriate statistical treatments and necessary QA/QC, and develop minimum data standards for inclusion in the program. It should also recommend research needed to improve protocols.

5.3 It is recommended that USGS move swiftly to fill key scientific positions, including those in the Upper and Lower Mississippi regions, and those at the National Wildlife Health Center, and the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center. It should consider supporting them from available FY 2000 funds.

5.4 Dedicated staffing at the national and regional levels is recommended so that program coordination responsibilities do not overwhelm scientists whose primary duties are research and monitoring; appointment of a full-time national coordinator at the Headquarters level is essential and an effective model for regional coordination must be developed and instituted nationally.

5.5 Detailed recommendations for implementation can be found in the Appendix.

6. Products and Outcomes

6.1 Using information provided by States, resource management agencies, and others, USGS will develop a dynamic National Atlas of Amphibian Populations, based on historical information on ranges of amphibian species and current locations of confirmed populations developed in extensive surveys. It will be continuously updated by acquisition of new data, and analysis of this information will reveal broad scale changes in distribution and abundance of species.

6.2 A national database with information developed within the framework, including appropriate metadata, quality indicators, and analytical tools, will be available and easily accessible on the World Wide Web by the scientific community, resource managers, and the public.

6.3 As part of its responsibilities to the program, the USGS will produce periodic regional and national syntheses of data from all sources within the framework, with the first report expected four years after inception of the program.

6.4 The desired outcome of a fully implemented framework will be better informed decision-making on issues that relate to the conservation of amphibians and resources on which they depend.

6.5 Information on amphibian populations will increase public awareness of these species, their status, and the environmental changes that affect them.


Figure 1. Conceptual diagram of the components of a national framework for amphibian monitoring, with surveys becoming more intensive and less extensive as one moves from the base to the apex of the pyramid. Activities at the different levels are integrated by:

• Common databases and reporting
• Compatible protocols, analytical tools, training, planning
• Research, which at all levels is guided by monitoring results
• Synthesis across ecological regions (National Atlas; synthesis reports)
• Research on causes of change
• Modeling