Amphibian Ark at the WAZA 80th Annual Conference

Amphibians are the most threatened vertebrate group, but they remain dramatically underfunded. 

In this talk at the 2025 WAZA 80th Annual Conference in Cali, Colombia, Amphibian Ark Executive Director Jonathan Wilcken outlines the scale of the amphibian crisis, the declining attention over the past 15 years, and the essential role of ex situ conservation breeding in preventing further extinctions. 

We are able to make this video available for you to watch thanks to Cali Zoo and WAZA. 

Video©Cali Zoo/WAZA

Watch it here:

Transcript:

 

Good morning, everyone. It's really great to be here in Cali with you all. Now, I've only got five minutes, so I won't talk about all of the work that we've been doing over the past year. I don't really have time for that. I want instead to focus on the crisis that fuels our mission, that Adolfo was talking about just a little bit there, and how we are reorganizing ourselves to respond.

My concern is that the amphibian extinction crisis has become a little normalized in our mind, maybe a little in the background, and that outside the amphibian conservation community, maybe even a little forgotten. So, as a reminder to us all: as Adolfo said, amphibians are the most threatened class of vertebrates by far; 41% of all amphibian species are on a path to extinction. We have seen 222 extinctions known or suspected so far. Most of those have been since the 1980s. So the world is losing one amphibian species every four months at the moment.

Terrestrial vertebrates are the most comprehensively assessed groups—mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians—but I want to zoom in a little bit and just look at the most threatened of those, those that are critically endangered or extinct in the wild. And this is what it looks like. So, in other words, if you grouped all terrestrial vertebrates that are on the brink of extinction together, half of them would be amphibians.

The question for us then is: how are conservation resources being directed? 

And, luckily, there's a recent study published by Hong Kong University that can tell us exactly this. The poor souls went through about 14,000 species-focused conservation programs around the world that are run by governments and international NGOs and they can tell us exactly where the money is being spent. This is what it looks like. So, although amphibians are half of all of the terrestrial vertebrates that are on the brink of extinction, they receive just 1.6% of the conservation resources. 

There's gonna be many reasons for this. I think at least partly this is a reflection of the degree of public interest in amphibians and amphibian conservation. And here we can get a little glimpse at this using internet search analytics. If we just look at the public interest in “biological conservation” in general, these show a really encouraging increase over the past 15 years. Sadly, when you focus specifically on amphibians, you can see that the trend is in the opposite direction. And this shift has real-world implications. So if we look more closely to home, so if we look at Amphibian Ark specifically, we can see exactly the same pattern over exactly the same period when we look at the number of zoological institutions that are our financial supporters. And we are not alone in this. Other groups that are focusing on amphibian conservation similarly report having greater difficulty in raising the resources we need. So there's a real need to boost awareness and to drive funding towards both in situ and ex situ conservation for amphibians.

So just a little bit now on Amphibian Ark more broadly: we were set up by WAZA and the IUCN largely through the work of the Conservation Planning Specialist Group to work in that zone that Fiona talked about so well yesterday, so, where species are cascading towards extinction before their habitats can be made safe. So our job is to mobilize support for those species to establish ex situ programs to give them the second chance that reintroduction offers. We've developed internationally recognized processes for diagnosing the species that need such a rescue. We work mainly in range countries to identify networks of institutions keen to get involved in ex situ amphibian breeding programs. We provide specialist training where it's needed and we provide funding and expertise to get these programs up and running. 

Since we began, some 74 amphibian species have been secured in this way, and a quarter of these are already reintroducing animals back to the wild. 

We work around the world, but we are increasingly aiming to build momentum in regional amphibian hotspots. So amphibians are found everywhere, and I mean everywhere. They're concentrated in every continent except the Antarctic, in fact. But they are concentrated, when they're threatened, in particular regions: so Latin America and the Caribbean are home to more than half of all threatened amphibians.

We've recently established an Americas and Caribbean directorate overseen by Luis Carrillo, and we now employ National Coordinators in Brazil, Guatemala, and here in Colombia. We are now turning our attention to the Afrotropics and South Asia. These contain a further 25% of the world's threatened amphibians. Devin Edmonds has recently joined us to oversee the program for this region. He's worked for many years in Madagascar, helped set up Madagascar's National Amphibian Breeding Center, and his focus will be on establishing National Programs in Madagascar, Cameroon, Sri Lanka, and India in the Western Ghats. All of them locally coordinated. 

In parallel with this, we are also working with a number of close collaborators to develop a comprehensive end-to-end approach to amphibian conservation around the world. So the organizations you see on this slide have been working on a program that would assist national governments to deliver fully on their Target 4 obligations with respect to amphibians. It would see us collectively deliver and build in-country capacity in every stage of the Assess-Plan-Act cycle within a country, and support local groups to implement both the in situ and ex situ actions that are needed. So this program has recently been given the strong support of the IUCN. We, the Coalition, were at the World Conservation Congress and the Coalition delivered two events at the Congress. The IUCN passed a resolution calling for an urgent scaling up of investment in amphibian conservation and endorsed specifically the collaborative approach that we have developed to support country-led programs across every stage of the cycle. 

So watch this space, feel free to get in touch with me if you want to explore ways of being involved. 

As ever, an enormous thank you to all of our partners and supporters. Without you, we couldn't do any of this. Do also come up and chat if you wanna know any more details about what we've been doing specifically this year. Thank you very much everyone.