According to Forest Service data the Ozark hellbender's range is in the White and Black River watersheds of southeast Missouri and northeast Arkansas.
---------------------------------------------------
Habitat Protection Urged for Ozark Hellbender

The Center for Biological Diversity this week urged the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate federally protected "critical habitat" for the Ozark hellbender, a rare, strictly aquatic salamander native to southern Missouri and northern Arkansas. The Ozark hellbender can grow up to two feet long, making it the largest amphibian in North America.

For almost nine years, the salamander was on the "candidate list" with dozens of other imperiled animals and plants that have been declared deserving of protection but whose federal safeguards have been postponed indefinitely. (The Center has an ongoing lawsuit to speed protections for all those species.) Finally, in September the Service proposed endangered status for the Ozark hellbender. But the agency refused to grant the salamander any critical habitat, which is supposed to accompany Endangered Species Act protection. "Designation of critical habitat would help put the Ozark hellbender on the path to recovery," said Collette Adkins Giese, a staff attorney at the Center focusing exclusively on protecting rare amphibians and reptiles. "Its populations are declining rapidly in response to threats like water-quality degradation of the streams where it lives."