Abstract Species monitoring plays an important role in determining whether conservation targets are being met. However, monitoring programs can be costly and logistically demanding. When site characteristics are strongly linked to species’ status, managers may instead choose to monitor the site characteristics themselves as a surrogate of species status. In this study, we modelled the occupancy status and abundance of pond-breeding amphibians in a network of protected areas across Switzerland. We incorporated remotely-sensed data describing habitat within breeding sites in order to identify any characteristics which could act as monitoring surrogates for amphibian species’ status. We found that connectivity between amphibian breeding sites was an important predictor of occupancy patterns for all species, but that abundance patterns were poorly predicted. Despite expectations that the habitat characteristics assessed from aerial images were important for the species studied, we found that these variables were rarely strong predictors of occupancy patterns. These results highlight the importance of caution in identifying species monitoring surrogates, and the need to explicitly demonstrate strong relationships between surrogates and state variables of interest before surrogates are used.

中文翻译：

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从航拍照片得出的当地栖息地测量值并不是两栖动物出现和数量的有力预测指标

摘要 物种监测在确定是否达到保护目标方面起着重要作用。然而，监控程序可能成本高昂且后勤要求高。当场地特征与物种状态密切相关时，管理者可能会选择监测场地特征本身作为物种状态的替代物。在这项研究中，我们模拟了瑞士各地保护区网络中池塘养殖两栖动物的占有状况和丰度。我们纳入了描述繁殖地点栖息地的遥感数据，以确定任何可以作为两栖动物物种状况监测替代品的特征。我们发现两栖动物繁殖地之间的连通性是所有物种占有模式的重要预测指标，但这种丰度模式的预测很差。尽管期望从航拍图像评估的栖息地特征对所研究的物种很重要，但我们发现这些变量很少是居住模式的强预测因子。这些结果强调了在识别物种监测代理时谨慎的重要性，以及在使用代理之前明确证明代理与感兴趣的状态变量之间的强关系的必要性。