Abstract
The Everglades ecosystem is a globally unique ecosystem that is recognized as a natural world heritage site, North-America’s only sub-tropical preserve, the largest sawgrass prairie in the world, and is home to nearly 6 dozen threatened or endangered species. Unfortunately, like many other ecosystems, the Everglades has been subjected to a wide variety of anthropogenic impacts that include wholesale habitat destruction, dramatic changes in sheet water flow, large numbers of invasive species, and consumptive exploitation both through overharvesting of fauna and resource acquisition. While the impact of these changes has been documented extensively for taxa such as wading birds, small mammals, and fishes, almost nothing has been documented about long-term changes in herpetofaunal abundance, distribution, or community composition. To address this lacuna, I utilized long-term data analysis, landscape level experiments, natural history studies, and population and community ecology analysis. I analyzed analyzed three long-term datasets that monitored amphibian abundances in the Everglades ecosystem across multiple decades, utilized a multi-year, landscape scale experiment to determine the impacts of changing hydrological regimes on the Everglades herpetofaunal community, used a combination of morphological analysis and DNA barcoding to analyze the dietary components of the two giant salamanders (the Greater Siren (Siren lacertina) and the Two-Toed Amphiuma (Amphiuma means)), undertook the largest multi-year capture-mark-recapture study on both species to estimate population demographics and a multi-year radio tracking study to determine seasonal movement patterns and estimate home-range sizes, and finally conducted an Everglades wide amphibian sampling project that was designed to understand the environmental drivers of amphibian abundance and community composition across the Greater Everglades Ecosystem.