Background

Amphibian population declines were first recognized as a global phenomenon in the early 1990s (Wake, 1991). We now know that current extinction rates for amphibians may be as much as 200 times higher than background (Roelants et al., 2007). With 32 % of the world’s nearly 6600 amphibian species threatened with extinction, 43 % experiencing declines and another 22 % with insufficient data (Stuart et al., 2004), this phenomenon represents the Earth’s sixth mass extinction (Wake and Vredenburg, 2008). A number of causes have been suggested to explain global amphibian declines. Habitat modification (loss) has played a significant role in many declines and is likely the single most important cause of local declines (Adams, 1999; Becker et al., 2007