查看文章

Wind‐borne pesticides have long been suggested as a cause of amphibian declines in areas without obvious habitat destruction. In California, the transport and deposition of pesticides from the agriculturally intensive Central Valley to the adjacent Sierra Nevada is well documented, and pesticides have been found in the bodies of Sierra frogs. Pesticides are therefore a plausible cause of declines, but to date no direct links have been found between pesticides and actual amphibian population declines. Using a geographic information system, we constructed maps of the spatial pattern of declines for eight declining California amphibian taxa, and compared the observed patterns of decline to those predicted by hypotheses of wind‐borne pesticides, habitat destruction, ultraviolet radiation, and climate change. In four species, we found a strong positive association between declines and the amount of upwind …