Amphibian Decline: An Integrated Analysis of Multiple Stressor Effects

Capturing the attention and imagination of the public and the scientific community alike, the mysterious decline in amphibian populations drew scientists and resource managers from ecotoxicology and chemistry, ecology and field biology, conservation biology, and natural resource policy to a SETAC–Johnson Foundation workshop. Facilitating environmental stewardship, increasing capacity of the sciences to explain complex stressors, and educating the public on relationships among communities of all types motivated these experts to address amphibian decline and the role of various stressors in these losses.

Greg Linder currently works for U.S. Geological Survey, Biological Resources Division, Columbia Environmental Research Center from his field office in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Greg works throughout North America on a wide range of studies involving various environmental issues, including those focused on declining amphibian populations. Greg has been a member of SETAC since early 1980 and has published on a wide range of topics, including aquatic, sediment, and soil toxicology; ecotoxicology of soil invertebrates, amphibians, and wild mammals; plant toxicology; ecological risk assessment of contaminated soils; wetlands risk assessment; and multiple stressors and causal analysis.

Sherry Kircher Krest has worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service for more than 7 years where she is currently an Environmental Contaminants Specialist at the Chesapeake Bay Field Office. She obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in education from Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania and a Master of Science degree in environmental biology from Hood College in Maryland. She has worked for the U.S. Army Biomedical Research and Development Laboratory, where she was involved in the interlaboratory validation study of the Frog Embryo Teratogenesis Assay-Xenopus (FETAX). Additionally, she has developed and implemented training for biologists and conservation professionals at the National Education and Training Center. She coordinated the Malformed Amphibian Project, a monitoring project recording the incidences of deformed amphibians on refuges nationwide. Her current work involves assessing, remediating, and restoring injured trust resources. She is concentrating her efforts on addressing the ongoing environmental problems caused by lead shot and assessing the use of frogs as a biomonitoring tool following remediation of trap and skeet ranges.

Donald W. Sparling is a research biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, Maryland. He has worked in the area of ecotoxicology for the past 15 years and has conducted research on several contaminants, including pesticides, white phosphorus, acid deposition, and metals. He has more than 70 publications to his name, dealing with avian behavior, waterfowl ecology, and amphibian ecotoxicology.