Project Description

Project Completion:  December 2019. This project is now complete.
Principal Investigator(s): Clint Moore, USGS Georgia Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit
Implements Science Plan Theme: 2 and 4

Key Points

• Studied potentially endangered reptile and amphibian species in the Coastal Plain region of the Southeast
• Made projections for risk of species extinction, population trends, and habitat conditions
• Helped USFWS with the study of specific species for SSAs and management decisions

Overview

The longleaf pine ecosystem in the southeastern U.S. supports several “at-risk” species. These species are undergoing status reviews by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS). These reviews determine if they are threatened or endangered due to habitat loss and other threats. This project focused on five at-risk reptile and amphibian at-risk species. These are the gopher tortoise, gopher frog, striped newt, southern hognose snake, and Florida pine snake. Their ranges are in the Coastal Plain region of the Southeast U.S.

Conservation partners must make decisions on how best to improve the statuses of these species. We have limited time before species declines are irreversible. But there is little scientific information to base these decisions on. This project aims to provide more of this information using a collaborative approach. We partnered with Federal, State, and other partners. Together, we assessed current habitat conditions and population trends of each species. We then predicted the risk of species extinction under future threats and management options. We compiled a database of over 72,000 species location records. These were collected from field surveys by partners and from citizen science programs. We displayed this data in multiple ways. We made both range-wide models and predictive maps of habitat suitability for each species.

Several parts of our project focused on specific species. We helped USFWS conduct the official Species Status Assessment for the southern hognose snake. We estimated the risk of extinction under both current and future scenarios. We based estimations on existing data as well as expert judgment. Our scenarios included varying degrees of urbanization, sea level rise, and management effort. We also studied gopher frog conservation. We co-developed a decision-making framework that identifies effective management actions for the frog. Our results can aid partners in making conservation decisions in the longleaf pine ecosystem. Our results can also inform status designation decisions of the USFWS

This work built on the SE CASC project, Science to Support Adaptive Landscape Planning and Decision Making for Gopher Tortoise Conservation.

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