Third update of the Ecotoxicology of Amphibians and Reptiles textbook - Recent advancements in amphibian and reptile ecotoxicology

ELENA ADAMS; CATHERINE AUBEE; JULIE C. BRODEUR; PAULA F. HENRY; JOHN MARTON; SCOTT WEIR

Congreso; Setac Europe 33rd Annual Meeting; 2023

Prior to the year 2000, ecotoxicological research focused on amphibians or reptiles was scarce compared to that for other vertebrate groups, often consisting of basic experimental approaches with limited ecological relevance. The First World Congress of Herpetology held in 1989 brought about by reports of global amphibian population declines, dramatically highlighted the importance and potential fate of this class of organisms. The 21st century has seen an increased understanding of ecotoxicology of amphibians and reptiles. More research has yielded greater numbers and diversity of publications, plus two editions of a textbook, Ecotoxicology of Amphibians and Reptiles by Sparling et al., which SETAC's Interest Group members are now seeking to update. For the second edition, Sparling et al. performed a literature review covering the years 1996-2008 showing that ten years after publication of the first edition, amphibians and reptiles remained underrepresented in the ecotoxicology literature relative to other vertebrates. Since the second edition, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of research studies and papers focusing on amphibians and reptiles and the effects and burdens of contaminants on these two classes of vertebrates. For the updated edition, we conducted a literature review for the years 2006-2022. Although the number of citations increased tremendously since the second edition, preliminary results show that amphibians and reptiles still remain underrepresented in literature. Of the 127,894 citations examined (7-fold increase in comparison to 1996-2008), 57% were for fish, 23% for mammals, and 13% for birds. Since the second edition, the number of citations related to amphibians increased from 3.8% to 4%. For reptiles, the number of citations increased from 0.8% to 3%. Moreover, there was a 9- and 24-fold increase of contaminant-related publications for amphibians and reptiles, respectively. Further evaluations on topics such as main contaminant classes, annual publication numbers, most studied taxa and emerging stressors such as climate change and diseases, are ongoing and detailed results will be presented at the conference