Amphibians

There is an overwhelming amount of evidence indicating declines and local extinctions of amphibian populations as a direct effect of global climate shifts (Stuart et al. 2005, Mendelson et al. 2006). Recently, a review suggested that amphibians are the least studied vertebrate t…

Ranavirus infection has caused severe disease and mass mortality in UK common frogs for more than twenty years resulting in serious declines in some populations. The pathogen has been studied since 1992. These studies generated two valuable resources exploited in this thesis: an…

The diversity of extant amphibians is staggering, yet the evolutionary history of many diverse lineages remains unknown. The goal of this thesis is to document and interpret patterns of diversity in a speciose lineage of frogs restricted to sub-Saharan Africa. Despite having a b…