Data from: Forests as promoters of terrestrial life history strategies in East African amphibians

Many amphibian lineages show terrestrialization of their reproductive strategy and breeding is partially or completely independent of water. A number of causal factors have been proposed for the evolution of terrestrialized breeding. While predation has received repeated attention as a potential factor, the influence of others such as habitat has never been tested using appropriate data or methods. Using a dataset that comprises 180 amphibian species from various East African habitats, we tested whether species occurring in different habitats show different patterns of terrestrialization in their breeding strategy. We recovered a significant association between terrestrialized breeding strategies and forest habitats. In general, forest seems to act as a facilitator, providing a permissive environment for the evolution of terrestrialized breeding strategies. However, while terrestrial oviposition is strongly correlated with lowland and montane forest habitat, complete terrestrial development is significantly correlated with montane forest only, indicating different selective pressures acting at different steps towards complete terrestrial development.诸多两栖动物支系均展现出繁殖策略的陆生化特征，其繁殖行为部分或完全脱离水体依赖。学界已提出多种驱动陆生繁殖演化的潜在成因。尽管捕食作为潜在影响因素已受到反复关注，但栖息地等其他因素的作用尚未通过恰当的数据与方法得到验证。本研究依托涵盖东非不同栖息地类型的180种两栖动物构建数据集，旨在检验不同栖息地的两栖类物种在繁殖策略陆生化方面是否存在差异模式。研究发现陆生繁殖策略与森林栖息地之间存在显著关联。总体而言，森林栖息地可作为促进因子，为陆生繁殖策略的演化提供适宜环境。不过，尽管陆生产卵与低地森林及山地森林栖息地均存在强相关性，但完全陆生发育仅与山地森林显著相关，这表明在迈向完全陆生发育的不同阶段，存在着不同的选择压力。