Critically Endangered
Dixie Valley toad
Anaxyrus williamsi
Dixie Valley toad is a toad in the family Bufonidae (order Anura) — Anaxyrus williamsi, recorded as Critically Endangered and tied to United States.
Appearance
It can be physically distinguished from the western toad by the scattered gold-colored flecks that cover its olive body, and is also the smallest member of the A. Boreas species complex in the region.
Range and habitat
The Dixie Valley toad is found only in a small complex of vegetated spring-fed marshlands in Dixie Valley, one of the hottest and most geothermally active systems in the region. It is endemic to Churchill County in the state of Nevada in the United States.
Pins are Wikidata “endemic to” fields. Orange dots, when present, are GBIF occurrence tiles — survey bias included.
Breeding
Calling males and egg sites define most frog field work. A species known from one ridge is as narrow as it sounds.
Eggs and damp skin make amphibians quick to vanish from a drained wetland or a forest stripped of litter.
In crisis
It was the first new toad species to be described from the United States since the description of the now-extinct in the wild Wyoming toad (A. Baxteri) about 49 years prior. While it is considered locally abundant within its extremely small range, environmentalist groups believe that it may be threatened by plans to build a binary cycle geothermal power plant, alleging that operations may degrade the marshland that it lives in by drying up the springs. In April 2022, the Fish and Wildlife Service designated the Dixie Valley toad an endangered species on a temporary, emergency basis.
A permanent decision to list the species as endangered was published and took effect on December 2, 2022.
Chytrid fungus, collection, and wet-forest loss are the usual pressures on frogs with a high threat category.
Dixie Valley toad is Critically Endangered on this catalog because that is the IUCN category stored on Wikidata. Confirm the official criteria and any later count on iucnredlist.org.
Sources
Written for this catalog from the English Wikipedia article on Dixie Valley toad, Wikidata item Q56346399. Family and order context is original field-guide writing about the group, not a copied assessment of this one species. Wikipedia text is CC BY-SA. Not an IUCN assessment. Counts, when quoted, can change — confirm them on the recovery programme and on iucnredlist.org.
