Wetlands conservation initially gained a foothold thanks to America's love for migratory ducks and duck hunting. Organizations such as Ducks Unlimited have contributed to the conservation of thousands of acres of large North American wetlands. Trouble is, the same impulse that led to conservation of large wetland habitats has also spawned initiatives to stock lakes and ponds with recreational fishing species.

This means that countless ponds and wetlands have in recent years been stocked with game fish that feed voraciously on amphibian eggs and tadpoles.

"It's part of the problem," says Semlitsch. "Our structure and emphasis have been on waterfowl and fish. But you've got another whole group of vertebrates, amphibians. And if, as a society, we consider them valuable, we've got to do something about it. We need to shift our paradigm from protecting just waterfowl and fish to protecting all semi-aquatic organisms. Invertebrates as well as vertebrates. How do you do that? You protect a diversity of habitats, permanent ones and ephemeral. Don't chop out the small ones because you don't think they're important." State and federal regulations protecting wetlands, however, are almost as varied as the myriad of animals and plants that depend on them for survival.

The federal Clean Water Act is intended to afford the nation's streams, rivers and large wetland areas protection, but not the small, isolated, ephemeral wetlands that amphibians favor. The act also does not directly address protection of lands surrounding a wetland, which, as Semlitsch and his students have shown, are every bit as important to ensuring a future for amphibian species.

"The fractured administration of wetlands, especially the smallest ones, is enormously frustrating for effective conservation," says David Skelly, an amphibian specialist and professor from the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University.

"There is relatively little centralization of expertise or decision-making, meaning that, in my home state of Connecticut, wetlands a few miles apart can be subject to radically different regulations. Other states are more centrally administered, but it remains a challenge to get regulators to think about the biology of wetlands when making their determinations."

Skelly is not alone in this view. Michael Klemens is the director of the Metropolitan Conservation Alliance in Rye, N.Y., a program of the Bronx-based Wildlife Conservation Society. Klemens is nationally known for his effort to provide developers and community planners with guidelines that will allow for the conservation of the small wetlands critical to amphibians.

The most well-meaning communities grant wetlands a 100-foot buffer zone around them, says Klemens. And while there is debate among researches as to whether or not these buffers protect water quality, there is near universal agreement that buffers do next to nothing to protect amphibians that divide their time between water and upland habitat.

"Most of our wetland regulations in this country have evolved out of the Clean Water Act and a desire to protect water quality, not to protect biodiversity. That's a real problem," he says. "A 100-foot buffer is an old water quality number and that's a number that has very little relevance to protecting biodiversity."

Of course in many communities, wetlands aren't protected at all; they are instead "regulated" by permits that grant developers rights to alter them. In many counties and municipalities, for example, there is no law that says a small, shallow wetland cannot be turned into a storm-water catch basin. While there may be no net loss of area, the unique qualities of individual wetlands are often wiped out, along with the amphibians that once thrived in them.

"We're developing like crazy in this country and in extremely wasteful patterns," Klemens says. "In my area, for example, we're using land ten times more rapidly than our population growth. We're spreading people more thinly, and that's sprawl." He goes on to say that conservationists are often correct in opposing certain kinds of development, but they need to have scientifically sound alternatives to offer in their place.

This, he says, is why the work of Ray Semlitsch and his students is so important to conservation efforts. "The kind of work Ray Semlitsch is doing is invaluable," Klemens says. "He is a pioneer, one of the first people to provide the empirical basis we need to ask regulators to make different decisions regarding wetlands protection."