Journal
PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Volume 107, Issue 31, Pages 13777-13782Publisher
NATL ACAD SCIENCES
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0914115107
Keywords
amphibian decline; biodiversity; chytridiomycosis; DNA barcoding; phylogenetic diversity
Categories
Funding
- National Science Foundation [DEB 0213851, 0234386, 0130273, 9996355]
- Bay and Paul Foundation
- Direct For Biological Sciences
- Division Of Integrative Organismal Systems [9996355] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [0130273, 0234386] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Amphibian populations around the world are experiencing unprecedented declines attributed to a chytrid fungal pathogen, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Despite the severity of the crisis, quantitative analyses of the effects of the epidemic on amphibian abundance and diversity have been unavailable as a result of the lack of equivalent data collected before and following disease outbreak. We present a community-level assessment combining long-term field surveys and DNA barcode data describing changes in abundance and evolutionary diversity within the amphibian community of El Cope, Panama, following a disease epidemic and mass-mortality event. The epidemic reduced taxonomic, lineage, and phylogenetic diversity similarly. We discovered that 30 species were lost, including five undescribed species, representing 41% of total amphibian lineage diversity in El Cope. These extirpations represented 33% of the evolutionary history of amphibians within the community, and variation in the degree of population loss and decline among species was random with respect to the community phylogeny. Our approach provides a fast, economical, and informative analysis of loss in a community whether measured by species or phylogenetic diversity.
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