Ever Wonder Where Your Donations to Disney Wildlife Fund Went?

Having contributed a few times to the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund whenever I am at Animal Kingdom (and getting those buttons), I've often wonder where exactly that money goes to.

Well, here's where part of it went:

"Status and Trends of Amphibian Declines and Extinctions Worldwide", S.N. Stuart et al., Science, v.306, p.1783 (2004).

Abstract: The first global assessment of amphibians provides new context for the well-publicized phenomenon of amphibian declines. Amphibians are more threatened and are declining more rapidly than either birds or mammals. Although many declines are due to habitat loss and overutilization, other, unidentified processes threaten 48% of rapidly declining species and are driving species most quickly to extinction. Declines are nonrandom in terms of species' ecological preferences, geographic ranges, and taxonomic associations and are most prevalent among Neotropical montane, stream-associated species. The lack of conservation remedies for these poorly understood declines means that hundreds of amphibian species now face extinction.

In their acknowledgment, we see this:

We thank the Moore Family Foundation, the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Conservation International, the MAVA Foundation, the U.S. Department of State, the Regina Bauer Frankenberg Foundation for Animal Welfare, NSF (grants DEB-0130273 and INT-0322375), the Critical Ecosystem Partnership Fund, George Meyer, Ben Hammett, and the Disney Foundation for financial support of the IUCN GAA. We are grateful to the more than 500 herpetologists who generously gave of their time and knowledge to compile the GAA data. R. Akçakaya, T. Brooks, D. Church, M. Denil, D. Frost, C. Gascon, G. da Fonseca, M. Foster, C. Hilton-Taylor, M. Hoffmann, T. Lacher, P. Langhammer, G. Mace, L. Manler, L. Master, A. Mitchell, R. Mittermeier, D. Wake, and F. Xie provided extensive help and advice on the implementation of the GAA. The majority of the distribution maps used for U.S. species were adapted from the United States Amphibian Atlas Database, which was assembled at Ball State University by P. Nanjappa, L. Blackburn, and M. Lannoo, and which was supported in part by grants and/or matching funds from the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, United States Fish and Wildlife Service, and Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund.

So rest assured that your money is well-spent for what it was intended, at least with this kind of study. Maybe I missed it, but it would be nice for the Disney Wildlife Conservation Fund to list all the places and research activities that they have supported.

Zz.