Shifted Baselines, Forensic Taxonomy, and Rabbs' Fringe-limbed Treefrog: The Changing Role of Biologists in an Era of Amphibian Declines and Extinctions

摘要

My initial foray in tropical herpetology yielded less than spectacular results. In 1989, I was a new graduate student at the University of Texas at Arlington, where my mentors, J. A. Campbell and E. D. Brodie Jr., arranged for me to spend a field season in Guatemala. My task was to make collections on the wet northern slope of the Sierra de las Minas, based out of Fin-ca Pueblo Viejo, a coffee/cardamom/rubber plantation at the edge of the Polochic Valley in Alta Verapaz (Mendelson 1990). This region of the sierra had never been surveyed herpetologi-cally, so I was very excited to conduct an expedition.