Culturing and biobanking of amphibian cell lines for conservation applications

The global crisis in amphibians’ extinction has been well documented and is now widely considered the worst modern loss of biodiversity among all vertebrate classes (Bower et al. 2017; Stuart et al. 2004). Causes are multifaceted, including emergent diseases, pollution, loss of habitat, and introduction of invasive species (see Chapter 2). Combined with the impacts from other difficult-to-manage threats such as climatic change (Cohen et al. 2019), hundreds more amphibian species are likely to be impacted in the near future with very few options for mitigation in the wild within the timeframe required to halt further declines and extinctions (Clulow et al. 2018; Bower et al. 2019, 2020).