The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia awards medal to noted Expert on Amphibians

The Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia announced on January 23, 2006 that it was awarding Dr. David Wake with the Joseph Leidy Award. Wake was one of the first to alert the scientific community to world-wide amphibian declines. He is an emeritus professor, curator of herpetology, and past director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology. He has studied amphibians for more than 40 years, and over that time he has monitored the steady decline of species around the world.

The Academy's President and CEO, Dr. D. James Baker, stated "We selected Dr. Wake for the award in recognition of his ground-breaking work in conservation biology, with a particular focus on the worldwide disappearance of amphibians and for his many outstanding contributions to systematics and evolutionary biology."

Living amphibians comprise about 5500 species or 20% of extant tetrapods. In the last 20 years the number of recognized living amphibian species has increased by 36%; the rate of discovery of new species exceeds that of any other vertebrate group. Many undescribed species remain; for example, more than 100 undescribed frog species have been reported in Sri Lanka. Yet, the decline and extinction of amphibian populations stands as a visible signal of environmental degradation.

No single cause for amphibian declines can be pinpointed, but scientists are striving to collect information on all the possible culprits as well as working on saving the remaining species. Wake has not only focused a large amount of his own research on amphibians, but has encouraged many of his students to pursue the cause, and with other scientists, developed tools to spread the word and awareness.

Here are some of the tools Dr. Wake has been helping to develop:

Amphibia Web, a site inspired by global amphibian declines, is an online system that allows free access to information on amphibian biology and conservation.

AmphibiaTree is a online community-based research effort to promote the study of amphibian phylogeny. The goal is to promote a comprehensive tree of all amphibians. It seeks "insights about evolutionary history through integrative studies from a range of data" and encourages supporters to join the research effort in order to "facilitate independent research, and to provide ideas and interaction."

HerpNET is a collaborative effort by institutions to establish a global network between databases of herpetological collections in natural history museums. The mission is to bring the accumulated knowledge from greater than 4.7 million specimens in world-wide museum collections into currency for science and society by creating a distributed database with access from various portals. HerpNET will connect large repositories of information with smaller collections that have regional specializations.

The Dr. Joseph Leidy award was established in 1923 in honor of Dr. Joseph Leidy (1823-1891), who was one of the first scientists to call attention to dinosaurs. He was an anatomist, a paleontologist, and the Academy's President. He helped popularize dinnosaurs when he described the first dinosaur discovered in America, Hadrosaurus foulkii, which became the first mounted dinosaur when it went on display in Philadelphia in 1868. Past recipients o fthe Leidy medal include ornithologist James Bond, biologist G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and entomologist Edward O. Wilson.