. The Next Phase of the GAA
It is proposed that a new GAA Coordinating Team be recruited by IUCN to take over the running of the project, which should remain a collaboration between IUCN/SSC, CI/CABS, and NatureServe. This team should be devoted full time to the GAA, and should consist of a Program Director and a Data Manager. These people would interact on an ongoing basis with the growing scientific network of data providers. Their tasks would be:
• To add new species and revalidated species to the database, and to make all other changes to the data on the basis of new or previously overlooked information.
• To conduct three to four data review workshops each year, covering the entire globe every four years.
• To maintain and enhance the GAA web site, and to provide ways to make the raw data widely available, especially to the original data providers.
• To undertake analyses of the GAA data and to communicate and publicize important new findings.
The new GAA Coordinating Team should be in place during 2006. Priority regions for early data review workshops are:
• East Asia (China, and the Koreas): This region has one of the earliest workshops in Phase 1, and the data are now likely to be quite out of date, especially since the Central Coordinating Team does not have the capacity to monitor scientific papers in the Chinese language. • Japan: There was no Japan workshop during Phase 1 of the GAA, and
the data need to be augmented significantly.
• North America: Likewise, there was no workshop during Phase 1 of the GAA, and the distribution maps (which follow county boundaries in the United States) need to be improved.
• Mesoamerica: Several important experts from this region were not able to participate fully in Phase 1 of the GAA, and the data can almost certainly be enhanced through additional review.
Other important regions for workshops before the end of 2007 are: Brazil (where agreement on the Red List Categories for certain species still needs to be reached); Madagascar (where the distribution maps need to be made more accurate); India and surrounding countries (where major taxonomic changes are greatly altering the overall understanding of the amphibian fauna); and Australia (which was the first region to have a data review workshop in Phase 1 of the GAA). The plan is to complete a review of every region of the world by the end of 2009.
. Budget
The approximate annual budget for maintaining the GAA continuous updating process is US $ 250,000 (for staff salaries and consultants), and US $ 120,000 for workshops, making a total annual expenditure of US $ 370,000. Although a significant cost, this is much less than the cost of occasional updating, and also much less than the anticipated conservation and research expenditures that will be required under ACAP. It is appropriate that such monitoring costs be a relatively small proportion of the overall ACAP budget, but, as outlined above, these expenditures are essential, because without the updating of the GAA it will not be possible to gain a comprehensive picture of the impact of ACAP in stemming amphibian declines and extinctions.
0. Introduction
Living amphibians comprise over 6000 known species, (AmphibiaWeb; Frost 2006) representing more than 20% of living tetrapods (Beebee and Griffiths 2005; Köhler et al. 2005). New species are being described at a rapid rate and in the last twenty years the number of recognized amphibians has increased, mostly by new discovery, by more than 40% (Köhler et al. 2005). With current levels of fieldwork we predict at least a 3% increase per year in the future.
The rate of discovery of new species exceeds that of any other vertebrate group; however, our knowledge of the amphibian fauna is still incomplete. The recent recognition of a large number of new species in areas such Sri Lanka (Manamendra-Arachchi and Pethiyagoda 2005), New Guinea (Tyler 1999), Madagascar (Glaw and Vences 2003), and the dozens of species described from the New World underscores the paucity of information we have even for large and diverse radiations. Amphibians inhabit most of earth’s biomes. The diversity of species and life histories coupled with late twentieth century declines and disappearances worldwide make amphibians an important model for understanding the causes of global changes (i.e., climate change, earth warming, pollution, habitat loss, etc.) and their effect on biodiversity.
The total number of amphibian species is still unknown and as much as 50% of the amphibian fauna may still be undescribed. Furthermore, we know little about genetic structure, population size, and population dynamics in many parts of the world, particularly in tropical areas of the New World, Africa, and Asia. The recent IUCN assessment indicates that as many as a third of amphibian species are globally threatened (Stuart et
al. 2004). However, comparing the proportion of threatened taxa to the
total number of species is inevitably confounded by two problems: 1) the total number of amphibian species is uncertain, but certainly much higher than the current figure of just over 6000 described species (Collins and Halliday 2005); and 2) even among the currently described species, 22.5% are listed by IUCN as Data Deficient, and many of these could actually prove to be threatened (Stuart et al. 2004).
Worldwide tropical and subtropical forest amphibians require the most research emphasis to document amphibian diversity before it is lost. Many portions of the forested slopes of the Andes are at best inadequately sampled, yet we know that these forests hold one of the highest diversities of amphibians in the world, most of which have very small distributional ranges. Morphological and genetic diversification of Amazonian anurans are not correlated, morphological diversification underestimates the diversity of anurans throughout the area. The remaining Atlantic Forests and the mountains of Southern of Brazil, the Yungas of Peru and Bolivia, and forested areas in Paraguay are also known to have high amphibian species diversity, and most species have limited distributions.
0. Systematics: The Science
Underlying the Establishment of
Conservation Priorities
Systematics is generally regarded as the discipline of science focused on deciphering and understanding biological diversity. Systematics plays