The project is focused on amphibians, currently the most vulnerable group of vertebrates on Earth, particularly sensitive to changes occurring in their environment. There is general consensus in the scientists’ community that climate change has the potential to drive amphibians’ declines globally, affecting their biology and distribution, either directly or indirectly. Thus, understanding their life-history patterns, such as aging and growth in relation to climate is of paramount importance in predicting population responses to climate change across broad geographic scales.

We aim to (i) improve the current knowledge regarding the biological and climate drivers that shape aging and growth patterns in amphibians, and (ii) use this knowledge to provide a quantitative measure of the potential impact of climate change on the life trajectories of these organisms. We foresee specific outputs that will inform amphibian conservation: (i) a ranking of the most relevant climate variables shaping patterns of aging and growth; (ii) a ranking of most vulnerable species/populations to climate changes.

The project is implemented over a period of two years (April 1st 2022 - March 31 2024), hosted by Ovidius University Constanța and is financed by the Romanian Ministry of Research, Innovation and Digitization, CNCS – UEFISCDI, within PNCDI III, Postdoctoral research projects (PD).

We will use data from published skeletochronology studies applied to amphibians, as well as raw, unpublished datasets. These data refer to age parameters and annual growth rates recorded in amphibian populations using skeletochronology. Only adults will be considered, and datasets will be analyzed separately by sex (male or female). Each entry is/will be dated (year of field sampling) and georeferenced. Other information like altitude, terrestrial ecoregions and biogeographical realms will be associated to each entry in the database.

Skeletochronology allows the age assessment based on growth patterns observed in the bone tissue of vertebrates. It is a non-lethal, fast (compared to capture-mark-recapture studies) and widely-used quantitative instrument for studying aging and growth in ectotherm populations, such as amphibians.

At Ovidius University Constanța, we applied and improved this method over the past decade, within the Criotomy Lab of the Faculty of Natural and Agricultural Sciences.