CITIZEN SCIENTISTS MONITOR A DEADLY FUNGUS THREATENING AMPHIBIAN COMMUNITIES IN NORTHERN COASTAL CALIFORNIA, USA

The iNaturalist platform as a source of data to study amphibians in Brazil

Based on debilitating recent budget cuts for science, Brazilian researchers had to find alternative ways to continue scientific production. Here we provide a perspective for the use of citizen-science data deposited in the iNaturalist platform as an alternative source of data to support biodiversity research. Observations contributed by volunteers can be analyzed at large spatial and temporal scales and can respond to questions in behavioral and population ecology. We analyzed this potential through the example of Brazilian amphibians, a group that is less studied worldwide than birds. In fact, to our knowledge, only two studies have been published that are based on citizen-science data for Brazilian amphibians. At the time of writing, the iNaturalist platform has over 14,800 research grade observations from Brazil, representing 698 species, a number increasing daily. Compared to other species-rich countries, volunteer-collected datasets from Brazil cover a relatively high taxonomic diversity (61%), providing a plethora of valuable data. Despite this potential, there are large spatial gaps in sampling in Brazil. Here we encourage established and budding herpetologists not only to use the platform to retrieve data, but also to contribute to iNaturalist actively, with new observations, as well as by identifying species in existing records.

Population genomic data reveal extreme geographic subdivision and novel conservation actions for the declining foothill yellow-legged frog

Genomic data have the potential to inform high resolution landscape genetic and biological conservation studies that go far beyond recent mitochondrial and microsatellite analyses. We characterize the relationships of populations of the foothill yellow-legged frog, Rana boylii, a declining, "sentinel" species for stream ecosystems throughout its range in California and Oregon. We generated RADseq data and applied phylogenetic methods, hierarchical Bayesian clustering, PCA and population differentiation with admixture analyses to characterize spatial genetic structure across the species range. To facilitate direct comparison with previous analyses, we included many localities and individuals from our earlier work based on mitochondrial DNA. The results are striking, and emphasize the power of our landscape genomic approach. We recovered five extremely differentiated primary clades that indicate that R. boylii may be the most genetically differentiated anuran yet studied. Our results provide better resolution and more spatially consistent patterns than our earlier work, confirming the increased resolving power of genomic data compared to single-locus studies. Genomic structure is not equal across the species distribution. Approximately half the range of R. boylii consists of a single, relatively uniform population, while Sierra Nevada and coastal California clades are deeply, hierarchically substructured with biogeographic breaks observed in other codistributed taxa. Our results indicate that clades should serve as management units for R. boylii rather than previously suggested watershed boundaries, and that the near-extinct population from southwestern California is particularly diverged, exhibits the lowest genetic diversity, and is a critical conservation target for species recovery.