No abstract

We report two new occurrence records for Jollyville Plateau Salamanders, Eurycea tonkawae Chippindale, Price, Wiens & Hillis, 2000, from an urbanized watershed in Travis County, Texas, USA. Eurycea tonkawae is listed as federally threatened under the Endangered Species Act of 1973 due to threats from urbanization, including degradation of water quality and quantity. These new records fill a distributional gap within its known range, highlight the importance of surveying historically neglected areas, identify unprotected populations, and encourage the discovery of new populations.

Urban expansion has contributed to the loss of habitat for range restricted species across the globe. Managing wildlife populations within these urban settings presents the challenge of balancing human and wildlife needs. Jollyville Plateau Salamanders (Eurycea tonkawae) are a range restricted, federally threatened, species of neotenic brook salamander endemic to central Texas. Almost the entire geographic range of E. tonkawae is embedded in the Austin, Cedar Park, and Round Rock metropolitan areas of Travis and Williamson counties, Texas. Among E. tonkawae occupied sites, Brushy Creek Spring has experienced some of the most extensive anthropogenic disturbance. Today the site consists of small groundwater outlets that emerge in the seams within a concrete culvert underlying a highway. Salamanders persist within this system though they are rarely detected. Here, we model the occurrence of salamanders within the surface habitat of Brushy Creek Spring using generalized linear models. In the absence of available data regarding the amount of water that is discharged from the spring, we use accumulated rainfall as a proxy for discharge to estimate salamander abundance. Additionally, we present evidence of reproduction, recruitment, and subterranean movement by E. tonkawae throughout this site. Infrastructure maintenance is inevitable at Brushy Creek Spring. We intend for our results to inform when maintenance should occur, i.e., during environmental conditions when salamanders are less likely to be observed in the surface habitat, to avoid unnecessary impacts to this federally threatened species.

Researchers and managers often need vehicular access into areas fenced to protect wildlife, but commonly used vehicle crossings often are cumbersome, cost‐prohibitive, or inadequate at restricting target taxa. We describe a cost‐effective method using partially buried conveyor belt, which is flexible and sturdy enough to allow convenient and frequent vehicular passage across wildlife fencing while not compromising the integrity of the barrier or harming the target species. We have no evidence of any target taxa (i.e., tortoises, freshwater turtles, toads) breaching a conveyor belt barrier from projects in central Florida (2005–2012), Guadalupe County, Texas (2014–2018), or Robertson County, Texas (2014). The proposed technique is unlikely to prevent large‐bodied, saltatory, climbing, or arboreal taxa from crossing a wildlife barrier. However, this technique is applicable to many small vertebrates and any taxa for which silt‐fencing or other similar semipermanent barriers are appropriate. © 2018 The Wildlife Society.