Revisiting Current Distribution and Future Habitat Suitability Models for the Endemic Malabar Tree Toad (Pedostibes Tuberculosus) Using Citizen Science Data

C. K. Aravind, Hebbar Priti, S. Harikrishnan, Chellam Ravi, The Mapping Malabar Tree Toad Programme & Kotambylu Vasudeva Gururaja

Scientific Reports | August 14, 2024

Climate change is one of the major drivers of biodiversity loss. Among vertebrates, amphibians are one of the more sensitive groups to climate change due to their unique ecology, habitat requirements, narrow thermal tolerance and relatively limited dispersal abilities. We projected the influence of climate change on an endemic toad, Malabar Tree Toad (Pedostibes tuberculosus; hereafter MTT) from the Western Ghats biodiversity hotspot, India, for two different shared socio-economic pathways (SSP) using multiple modeling approaches for current and future (2061–2080) scenarios.