﻿Relationship between anuran larvae occurrence and aquatic environment in septentrional east Palearctic landscapes

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Abstract

The presence of amphibian larvae is restricted by both biotic and abiotic variables of the environment. Some of these variables are still undetermined in the septentrional eastern Palearctic where Rana amurensis, Strauchbufo raddei and Dryophytes japonicus are found in large numbers. In this study, we sampled 92 sites across Mongolia, Russia and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and measured biotic and abiotic water variables, as well as the height of flooded terrestrial and emergent aquatic vegetation at the breeding site. We determined that the presence of anuran larvae is generally, but not always, linked to pH and temperature. Rana amurensis was not significantly affected by any of the variables measured, while S. raddei was impacted by water conductivity and D. japonicus by pH, temperature and vegetation. Our results highlight a potential risk for these species due to the changes in aquatic variables in response to desertification.

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Most cited references 37

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Impacts of climate warming on terrestrial ectotherms across latitude.

Curtis A Deutsch, Joshua Tewksbury, Raymond Huey … (2008)

The impact of anthropogenic climate change on terrestrial organisms is often predicted to increase with latitude, in parallel with the rate of warming. Yet the biological impact of rising temperatures also depends on the physiological sensitivity of organisms to temperature change. We integrate empirical fitness curves describing the thermal tolerance of terrestrial insects from around the world with the projected geographic distribution of climate change for the next century to estimate the direct impact of warming on insect fitness across latitude. The results show that warming in the tropics, although relatively small in magnitude, is likely to have the most deleterious consequences because tropical insects are relatively sensitive to temperature change and are currently living very close to their optimal temperature. In contrast, species at higher latitudes have broader thermal tolerance and are living in climates that are currently cooler than their physiological optima, so that warming may even enhance their fitness. Available thermal tolerance data for several vertebrate taxa exhibit similar patterns, suggesting that these results are general for terrestrial ectotherms. Our analyses imply that, in the absence of ameliorating factors such as migration and adaptation, the greatest extinction risks from global warming may be in the tropics, where biological diversity is also greatest.