Planet Earth is undergoing unprecedented levels of environmental degradation and destruction at a global scale. Incentivizing people to adopt behaviors that are compatible with a sustainable future will help address the current ecological crisis. However, it is first necessary to understand the psychological drivers of pro-environmental behavior. Here, we examined whether greater levels of environmental knowledge and empathy predicted higher levels of pro-environmental behavior in an Australian population sample. We aimed to advance our understanding of the psychological variables that motivate people to act in pro-environmental ways, while also advancing the ongoing debate amongst conservation scientists regarding the relative importance of fostering empathy. Correlational analyses revealed that objective, verifiable knowledge was a strong predictor of pro-environmental attitudes and behavior. Empathy also correlated positively with pro-environmental attitudes and behavior, but with a dissociation with respect to its cognitive and affective components. Multivariate analyses revealed that knowledge was a stronger predictor of both pro-environmental attitudes and behavior after controlling for individual variation in cognitive and affective empathy. This finding casts doubt on the claim by compassionate conservationists that fostering empathy is the key to solving the current environmental conservation crisis. Future research should aim to extend the present findings by testing whether a more exhaustive test of participants’ environmental knowledge and other measures of empathy, including empathic competencies and the recently developed Emotional and Cognitive Scale of the Human–Nature Relationship (ECS-HNR), yield the same dominance of knowledge over empathy.

The unprecedented rate of global amphibian decline is attributed to The Anthropocene, with human actions triggering the Sixth Mass Extinction Event. Amphibians have suffered some of the most extreme declines, and their lack of response to conservation actions may reflect challenges faced by taxa that exhibit biphasic life histories. There is an urgent need to ensure that conservation measures are cost-effective and yield positive outcomes. Many conservation actions have failed to meet their intended goals of bolstering populations to ensure the persistence of species into the future. We suggest that past conservation efforts have not considered how different threats influence multiple life stages of amphibians, potentially leading to suboptimal outcomes for their conservation. Our review highlights the multitude of threats amphibians face at each life stage and the conservation actions used to mitigate these threats. We also draw attention to the paucity of studies that have employed multiple actions across more than one life stage. Conservation programs for biphasic amphibians, and the research that guides them, lack a multi-pronged approach to deal with multiple threats across the lifecycle. Conservation management programs must recognise the changing threat landscape for biphasic amphibians to reduce their notoriety as the most threatened vertebrate taxa globally.

Aim: Changes to the extent and severity of wildfires driven by anthropogenic climate change are predicted to have compounding negative consequences for ecological communities. While there is evidence that severe weather events like drought impact amphibian communities, the effects of wildfire on such communities are not well understood. The impact of wildfire on amphibian communities and species is likely to vary, owing to the diversity of their life‐history traits. However, no previous research has identified commonalities among the amphibians at most risk from wildfire, limiting conservation initiatives in the aftermath of severe wildfire. We aimed to investigate the impacts of the unprecedented 2019–2020 black summer bushfires on Australian forest amphibian communities.Location: Eastern coast of New South Wales, Australia.Methods: We conducted visual encounter surveys and passive acoustic monitoring across 411 sites within two regions, one in northeast and one in southeast New South Wales. We used fire severity and extent mapping in two multispecies occupancy models to assess the impacts of fire on 35 forest amphibian species.Results: We demonstrate a negative influence of severe fire extent on metacommunity occupancy and species richness in the south with weaker effects in the north—reflective of the less severe fires that occurred in this region. Both threatened and common species were impacted by severe wildfire extent. Occupancy of burrowing species and rain forest specialists had mostly negative relationships with severe wildfire extent, while arboreal amphibians had neutral relationships.Main Conclusion: Metacommunity monitoring and adaptive conservation strategies are needed to account for common species after severe climatic events. Ecological, morphological and life‐history variation drives the susceptibility of amphibians to wildfires. We document the first evidence of climate change‐driven wildfires impacting temperate forest amphibian communities across a broad geographic area, which raises serious concern for the persistence of amphibians under an increasingly fire‐prone climate.

An increase in the frequency and intensity of catastrophic wildfires is associated with anthropogenic climate change. Wildfires are extreme environmental events that result in dramatic fluctuations in temperature and moisture, which are likely to disproportionately impact animals such as amphibians (Anura) whose distributions and ecology are strongly tied to climate. In response to the 2019/20 Australian summer wildfires, we used expert elicitation to analyse the traits of frogs that potentially influence fire sensitivity or resilience. Traits that were ranked high in terms of influencing fire sensitivity were range size, dominant adult habitat, reproductive mode, and relative abundance. While species restricted to cool, moist habitats are less exposed to the threat of wildfire, they had the highest sensitivity scores. This is due to their typically low fecundity, reliance on micro-refugia away from water for reproduction and shelter, and small, isolated distributions. The group considered least sensitive were those which occupy riparian zones as macro-refugia, which includes species with wide geographic distributions, general reproductive strategies, high fecundity, and moderate physiological capacity. Our findings suggest that it is the behavioural capacity of frogs to locate micro-refugia, a morphology that enables them to move into these safe spaces, and physiological adaptations to subsequently maintain water balance during and after wildfire that influence the probability of surviving wildfire. While many traits have evolved among amphibians to avoid climatic extremes and likely confer resistance to wildfire as “exaptations”, it remains unknown to what extent they protect populations from predicted hotter and drier climates. Our predictions should be tested by obtaining direct measures of the thermal and moisture buffering capacities of micro-refuges, along with the continued monitoring of species recovery post-fire, so that they can feedback into future trait-based analyses. We suggest that strategic management actions for mitigating the effect of climate-driven wildfires on amphibians should involve protection and enhancement of micro-refugia components of the landscape, which are used as shelter during times of heat and moisture stress, and provision of buffer zones around macro-refugia habitat, such as around streams.

The status of many amphibian populations remains unclear due to undetected declines driven by disease and difficulties in obtaining accurate population estimates. Here, we used genome complexity reduction-based sequencing technology to study the poorly understood Littlejohn’s treefrog, Litoria littlejohni across its fragmented distribution in eastern Australia. We detected five identifiable genetic clusters, with moderate to strong genetic isolation. At a regional scale, population isolation was likely driven by population crashes, resulting in small populations impacted by founder effects. Moderate genetic isolation was detected among populations on the Woronora Plateau despite short distances between population clusters. Evidence of recent declines was apparent in three populations that had very small effective population size, reduced genetic diversity and high inbreeding values. The rates of inbreeding detected in these populations combined with their small size leave these populations at elevated risk of extinction. The Cordeaux Cluster was identified as the most robust population as it was the largest and most genetically diverse. This study exemplifies the value of employing genetic methods to study rare, cryptic species. Despite low recapture rates using traditional capture-recapture demographic methods, we were able to derive population estimates, describe patterns of gene flow, and demonstrate the need for urgent conservation management.