3) Government Award, Issued by Army Corps of Engineers ( ), through Cooperative agreement #W9126G-12-2-0004 to TAG and CAH. Sponsored by DoD Legacy Resource Management Program ( ). 2) Government Award, Issued by Army Corps of Engineers ( ), through Cooperative agreement #W9132T-11-2-0028 to TAG and CAH. Fish and Wildlife Service ( ), through Cooperative Agreement #F14AC00068 to CAH and TAG. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.ĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: The authors received funding from three sources for this study: 1) Government Award, Issued by U.S. Received: OctoAccepted: FebruPublished: February 24, 2016Ĭopyright: © 2016 Chandler et al. Baldwin, Clemson University, UNITED STATES Consequently, we emphasize the importance of conservation and management for mitigating other forms of habitat degradation, especially maintenance of high quality breeding sites where reproduction can occur during appropriate environmental conditions.Ĭitation: Chandler HC, Rypel AL, Jiao Y, Haas CA, Gorman TA (2016) Hindcasting Historical Breeding Conditions for an Endangered Salamander in Ephemeral Wetlands of the Southeastern USA: Implications of Climate Change. We suggest that climate change will continue to impact the reproductive success of flatwoods salamanders and other ephemeral wetland breeders by reducing the number of years these wetlands have suitable hydroperiods. Mean hydroperiods were shorter in recent years than at any other point since 1896, and thus less suitable for A. Using change-point analysis, we identified significant shifts in average hydroperiod over the last century in all 17 wetlands.

bishopi reproduction (e.g., only 61% of years, using a conservative estimate of development time, were conducive to larval development and metamorphosis). Reconstructed hydroperiods for the 17 wetlands were highly variable through time but were frequently unfavorable for A.

Empirical models were subsequently used to reconstruct wetland hydrologic conditions from 1896–2014 using the downscaled historical climate datasets. bishopi breeding wetlands by combining downscaled historical climate-model data with a recent 9-year record (2006–2014) of observed water levels. We empirically modeled hydroperiod of 17 A. Reticulated flatwoods salamanders ( Ambystoma bishopi), a federally endangered species, depend exclusively on ephemeral wetlands and require at least 11 weeks to successfully metamorphose into terrestrial adults. In mesic and wet pine flatwoods of the southeastern United States, ephemeral wetlands were a common landscape feature. The hydroperiod of ephemeral wetlands is often the most important characteristic determining amphibian breeding success, especially for species with long development times.

Extend ephemeral pond hydro period