PARENT SESSION
Oral Session #79: Conservation Ecology: Biodiversity Case Studies and Models. Presiding: T. Rooney.
Friday, August 10, 2001. 8:00 AM to 12:00 PM. Hall of Ideas J.
Community-level conservation: Stream-breeding frogs in the forests of subtropical eastern Australia.
PARRIS, KIRSTEN1, 1
ABSTRACT- The forests of subtropical eastern Australia support a diverse frog fauna, but the habitat requirements of many of its component species are poorly understood. I investigated relationships between environmental variables and the diversity and composition of frog assemblages at forest streams in south-east Queensland and north-east New South Wales, Australia. I surveyed 65 sites for frogs with a combination of nocturnal searches and automatic recording of advertisement calls. Logistic regression modeling indicated that frogs were more likely to occur at larger streams (P<0.001), while poisson regression demonstrated that species richness at a site increased with increasing stream size (P<0.01). At sites with at least one frog species, the composition of frog assemblages was significantly correlated with mean temperature of the warmest quarter (P<0.01) and the complexity of the mid-storey of the riparian forest (P<0.001). Results of this study indicate that conservation of a range of stream sizes and riparian vegetation types across the range of climatic variation is necessary for conservation of the diversity of stream breeding frogs in the region.
KEY WORDS: frogs, amphibians, community ecology, streams