Summary:

Delaying species management can be expensive, reduce the chance of successful recovery, and increase the risk of declines. Proactive management can be more efficient in sustaining populations and keeping common species common.  The challenge to proactive management is that it often requires initiating actions under high levels of uncertainty, which can pose considerable challenges in justifying conservation expenditures and balancing potential risks to other aspects of an ecosystem. These kinds of decisions need robust information on species distributions of abundance.  Collecting and making sense of data for common, cryptic, and widely distributed species is challenging, despite the obvious utility to wildlife conservation decisions.  Salamanders, whose center of diversity is here in the United States, are an exemplary taxa for these challenges.  Here I show how we developed and used novel quantitative models to better understand the distribution and abundance of common and hard to study amphibians across the northeastern United States.  Together, this work helps to generate the information needed to reduce uncertainty and provide the science to support proactive management and conservation.