How Did We Get Here?

Let’s go back to 2006. I was being hired by the US Navy in San Diego, California, after working for the US Marine Corps. Staff and leadership at navy headquarters and the DoD in Washington, DC, were aware of a doctoral candidate named Rob Lovich as well as another recently graduated herpetologist who had started with the US Navy in Norfolk, Virginia, Chris Petersen. Both the navy and DoD were determined to initiate a military-wide network for amphibians and reptiles, primarily because military lands are home to the highest density of threatened and endangered species of any federal lands in the United States. Amphibians and reptiles follow that trend with tremendous densities and diversity, regardless of their status as protected or not. The US Navy and DoD recognized the benefit of getting all the military services (US Army, US Navy, US Air Force, and US Marine Corps) to work collaboratively on amphibian and reptile conservation and management, especially for military bases that shared the same protected species but were not necessarily working collaboratively to protect and recover those species.

Chris and I were encouraged individually to begin drafting a strategic plan for the entire DoD for the conservation and management of amphibians and reptiles. Chris and I had never met each other, but we enthusiastically started working on this enormous undertaking to bring together and harmonize the military services natural resource programs and to adopt the shared goals and multiagency coordination efforts of protecting, managing, and researching amphibians and reptiles across all military lands in the United States. By 2007, we were submitting funding proposals to DoD. By 2008, we received our first funding to create the DoD Strategic Plan for Amphibians and Reptiles, as well as to sample the continental United States in a single transect for amphibian Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, or BD, which causes the disease chytridiomycosis. While creating and implementing the strategic plan was our priority, the scientific community, at the time, was grappling with the devastating effects of BD on amphibians. We felt it was imperative to assess the effects of BD on amphibian species on US military lands in order to protect both the species and the military mission. Our reasoning, then and now, is that amphibian population declines, or population declines for any species for that matter, can result in greater legal protections for those species. Those protections can lead to increased management costs and increased permit and consultation requirements with regulatory agencies, which can encumber the military mission. Thus, we recognized early in our careers the benefits of proactive conservation to avoid species declines and also the need for multistakeholder collaborations (across the range of the respective species) to help reverse those population declines.

Chris Petersen and I received our first year of funding in 2008 and embarked on our ambitious DoD PARC nationwide BD transects with Mike Lannoo, Priya Nanjappa, and Joe Mitchell. Joe did all the sampling, and the rest of the team took turns assisting him at various military bases over the course of the study. From the coast of Virginia to the coast of California—and at 13 other military bases in between—we sampled all amphibians encountered at three different intervals that first year. Those preliminary results were published under the title Do Frogs Still Get their Kicks on Route 66. It was a great start that was well received and provided vital new scientific information. Additional studies followed, with transects covering the United States from north to south and a citizen science effort that included several dozen bases all across the country. Study findings revealed a general pattern: BD is endemic to the United States; it is not causing widespread declines of species in the United States as it has in other parts of the world; and BD is generally less common in hotter and drier regions of the United States.

When considering the DoD strategic plan, we looked first to the model of the national nongovernmental organization called Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (PARC). They already had considerable size and depth and had brought together hundreds of stakeholders for the shared goal of conserving amphibians and reptiles. Why reinvent the wheel, right? Chris and I worked collaboratively with Priya Nanjappa and Ernie Garcia; their guidance was particularly helpful with drafting the plan and formulating how to gain support for ultimately implementing the plan. Chris and I then led a series of strategic plan workshops for military leadership to review and discuss the plan and to gain their support and concurrence. Let me tell you, that was no easy chore. Implementing a bold new initiative for all of DoD is a task earned and not given. Myriad considerations need to be made, and frankly, people need to be convinced the effort is worth implementing for a better outcome.

Each of the military services already had their own natural resource programs and were spending enormous amounts of money protecting their respective amphibian and reptile species. They had valid concerns about funding yet another department-wide network specific to amphibians and reptiles. I remember one 2010 meeting in particular, when I was giving a strategic plan presentation in front of military leadership. I was extremely nervous beforehand, and a dear colleague pulled me aside backstage and said, You need three things for a successful project of this kind: (1) Funding, which we have given to you and Chris. (2) A plan, which you have drafted. And (3) a hero. You’re that hero, now go out and do your job. Her words immediately affected me, and I knew that whatever my own feelings, this was bigger than Rob Lovich or any other personality involved, and I had to go out and lead this effort.

Trust me when I say there was plenty of work for Chris and me to share, and plenty of times we each had to put on our proverbial superhero capes to maintain the support needed to build such a vast effort for an entire department of the US government. But in that moment, I stepped into my role and led that presentation. I stood the test, and we delivered the goods. Several more workshops, and enormous and complex rounds of tense negotiations, followed. Even though I grew up in Virginia, literally across the Potomac River from Washington, DC, developing our strategic plan was a baptism by fire in what they call ‘Beltway politics’ in our nation’s capital and in what it takes to build something this expansive for the entire DoD!

Fast-forward to 2015, and we were able to finalize the DoD Strategic Plan for Amphibians and Reptiles. There were literally years of delays, intervals of nonconcurrence by some of the military services, lots of hand-wringing, vast amounts of time spent advocating/assuaging individuals, and endless reviews and re-reviews before it was finally complete. When we put it in front of John Conger, acting assistant secretary of defense in 2015, he signed the plan with no objections and the full support of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, and we were finally able to fully implement the plan. Our internal processes now changed completely with an authorized strategic plan to implement. New activities such as branding, creating a logo, developing discrete products, and undertaking projects to assist the military services with amphibian and reptile everything were underway. It took six years, but now we are fully legitimate. I have to take a moment to share my appreciation for the foresight, support, and hard work that the staff at the DoD have given DoD PARC all these years.

Disease

As mentioned, some of our formative work to address threats to amphibians and reptiles on military lands included several projects focused on BD. As Chris and I have managed DoD PARC through time, various wildlife diseases have continued to arise as threats, and we have been forced to tackle such things head-on. Neither Chris nor I went to school to become experts in wildlife epidemiology per se, but boy have we had to add that to our skill set. It’s a terrible indicator of global biodiversity conditions, but BD, Batrachochytrium salamandrivorans (Bsal), snake fungal disease, turtle shell disease, among others, have all had devastating effects on herpetofauna and appear to be increasing. It isn’t something I signed up for, nor is it a particularly appetizing topic of research, but continued research and abatement for mitigation of the deleterious effects from these pathogens is of paramount importance.

Fieldwork/Fun

Have you heard the saying, Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life? As I have told many of my colleagues over the years, I am thrilled each day by the fact that I have a job in my favorite profession (biologist–herpetologist), AND I get to be a patriot serving my government as a civil servant and employee of the US Navy. The larger military landscape where I conduct my work is an amazing place with sheltered and protected biodiversity, including amphibians and reptiles, as a direct result of having natural and secure lands for the training and testing mission. Chris and I, and our other military biologist colleagues, get to go all over the world managing, protecting, and studying the amazing species that reside on our lands.

Our inventories of amphibians and reptiles have covered the globe. Chris and I get to do a lot of the work, but our colleagues stationed at military bases within and outside the continental United States also do a lot of the heavy lifting. Whether conducting general inventories for species literally all over the United States, or traveling to places like Sicily, Japan, Kenya, Spain, Greece, Romania, and Mexico, we get to seek out and define the composition and status of herpetofauna wherever the US military needs it done. We even revised, with the help of many colleagues, the venomous snakebite treatment protocol for the DoD in the European and North African theater of operations and wrote a field guide to the venomous snakes of several countries in Central America, all at the request of the military services. You never know what we will find in our inbox, or where it is coming from, to serve the men and women of America’s military services better. It has been especially rewarding as well to include so many outside stakeholders, individuals, and institutions. Most folks don’t know just how much the military does to protect the biodiversity heritage of the United States. The military’s full support behind DoD PARC to benefit both the amphibians and reptiles on military bases, while also protecting its mission, is a tremendous success story. I am grateful to be in this position and thank all the hardworking military employees and their contractors who help in the same fashion each day.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge the dedicated men and women who have in the past or now serve in the US military. Many of our peers and colleagues in herpetology have done so, some of whom were inspired to become herpetologists while serving abroad. Their stories and sacrifices would take many more pages to share, and their legacy lives large.

About the Author

After graduating from Loma Linda University with his PhD in 2009, Robert Lovich became a senior natural resource specialist for the US Navy in San Diego, California. His primary duties include managing herpetological and natural resource projects on military lands throughout the United States. Robert has been studying amphibians and reptiles professionally for 25 years. He is the national technical director for the Department of Defense Partners in Amphibian and Reptile Conservation (DoD PARC) since its formation in 2009. Robert has authored many herpetological peer-reviewed publications, popular interest articles, book chapters, and books. When not surfing, golfing, or working on his 1960s muscle cars, his work and interests include natural history and evolution of herpetofauna; application of endangered species conservation; and integrating science into natural resource management.