Surveying imperiled salamanders

This is a project that's part of our conservation biology capstone course. The students are here today to survey a population of salamanders that's found here on Mill Mountain. And there's a question about what species it is, because it's only found here on the mountain and kind of scattered populations and not really anywhere around in like Roanoke, and in the in the valley areas. The city, and Discovery Center, and the zoo are really interested to understand like where it is so that we can manage it sort of more appropriately and really kind of focus in on how to protect it and how to promote it. From our perspective it's important to understand where these animals are so that we can really manage them without accidentally having them go locally extinct. Appalachia is special because it has a lot of cryptid species, meaning there's a lot of salamanders that look similar but are genetically different. And what we don't know about these species is how they react to their environments, if they're different, so it's important to save that biodiversity. What we're doing for our project this year is specifically trying to look at their density, so how many are there on the mountain here. We're doing that through trying to use photographs to identify the spot patterns on their sides to identify individuals and do mark recapture to estimate their density here. So we're taking GPS points because we're also creating a hotspot map. If maybe we found more in certain areas, we're going to be developing a fact sheet. I think it'd be interesting for kids from Roanoke to see why we have this imperiled, endemic salamander right near where we live. I think it could be good for outreach. I'd like to do field work as a career. Getting this experience, I hope, helps me a lot. It's fun to be in the efforts for this species.