Study suggests frogs and toads will face new risks as water habitats dry up due to global warming
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A small international team has found that anurans such as frogs and toads will be facing increased risks to their survival in the coming years due to water habitats drying up as a result of global warming.
In a paper published in the journal Nature Climate Change, the group describes how they mapped global areas where water limitations will increasingly put anurans species at an increased risk of dying over the next 60 to 80 years.
Over the past several years, scientists around the globe have been studying the causes and effects of global warming. Many models now predict an average global temperature rise of 2.7°C by the end of this century. Such a drastic change, as has been noted by many, will lead to major changes to the climate and ecosystems around the planet.
One such change, the team on this new effort notes, will be loss of water in habitats where anurans currently reside. Loss of water in such areas will result in reductions in the size of some habitats, and disappearance of others. Such changes, they note, will make life increasingly difficult for anurans, which are already facing challenges due to deforestation, fungal outbreaks, pollution, and warmer temperatures due to climate change that have already occurred.
In this new study, the research team has attempted to estimate the number of areas where frogs and toads are currently living will be at an increased risk of drought.
Frogs and toads are especially sensitive to climate changes that involve loss of water because they have thin skins, which must remain moist for them to survive. Without water, they suffocate. To estimate future risk due to droughts, the researchers used a variety of tools to map areas across the globe that are expected to experience more drought as global temperatures rise. They also estimated ecotype sensitivity to drought and created models depicting the likely behavioral impact under multiple climate change scenarios.
The research team found that between 7% and 30% of current frog and toad habitats will become too dry to support their survival by 2100. They also found that between 15% and 36% of such areas will experience drought due to regular heat waves by the end of the century. The anurans will also continue to face increasing risks as ecosystems are lost to human development and as pollution remains and as natural risks such as fungal infections continue to spread.
More information: Nicholas C. Wu et al, Global exposure risk of frogs to increasing environmental dryness, Nature Climate Change (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s41558-024-02167-z
Journal information: Nature Climate Change
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