How to make meadow restoration work for California’s mountain frogs?

Abstract

Intensive land uses have transformed many of the Sierra Nevada's meadows from multi-thread channels with annually inundated floodplains into single-thread, incised channels that store less water and have reduced habitat quality for a diverse suite of meadow-associated wildlife. Among the organisms that inhabit montane meadows, amphibians are especially threatened. Meadows may serve as refugia for amphibians, including the declining Cascades frog (Rana cascadae), due to their complex and varied habitat conditions. We evaluated the relationship between meadow hydrological conditions and habitat use by Cascades frogs to understand the conditions that promote population persistence. The frogs tend to occur in meadows with consistently high water tables with off-channel pools for egg and larval development. Within meadows, adult frogs occur in the more open, fluvially active regions while juveniles reside in secondary channels and oxbows.

Citation

Pope, Karen; Yarnell, Sarah; Piovia-Scott, Jonah. 2019. How to make meadow restoration work for California’s mountain frogs? Proceedings of the 4th Joint Federal Interagency Sedimentation and Hydrologic Modeling Conference, Reno, NV. 4 p.