July 2021 report by USGS National Wildlife Health Center:
“The emerging pathogen Bsal is a severe threat to global urodelan (salamanders, newts, and related taxa) biodiversity. Bsal has not been detected, to date, in North America, but the risk is high because North America is one of the global hotspots for urodelan biodiversity.”
“A widespread surveillance effort conducted by the USGS Amphibian Research and Monitoring Initiative contributed to reducing consequence risk by increasing confidence of Bsal absence in high-risk areas (Waddle et al., 2020). However, the risk-reduction benefit of surveillance is restricted to the time-period when surveillance was conducted. On-going surveillance is important as long as there is continued import and introduction risk.”
