Have you heard these frogs? South Australia’s ‘most wanted’ list
Three frogs native to South Australia are on a ‘most wanted’ list, as citizen scientists across the country gear up to record amphibian mating calls this week. One of the nation’s top frog experts puts five SA regions on notice.
Organisers of Australia’s biggest citizen science project say it will help experts understand the country’s ecosystem and national frog population better, improving monitoring threatened frog species and conservation efforts.
Called FrogID Week, the project encourages Australians to record the croaks of frogs in their backyards and local area via an app from November 7 to November 16.
Since it commenced in 2017, 1.3 million frog voices had been recorded through the free FrogID app. This led to the discovery of 13 new Australian frog species, including four which were described as new to science in the past year.
This year, the FrogID team had three species native to South Australia on its ‘most wanted’ list: the Northern Flinders Ranges Froglet, the Southern Flinders Ranges Froglet and the Knife-footed Frog.
“The Flinders Ranges Froglets are South Australian endemics; they’re only in this little patch of terrain in streams there,” FrogID lead scientist Dr Jodi Rowley said.
“We have very few recordings of them and they’re really poorly known.
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“We’re hoping that people that are out there in the right conditions might get their recordings of them.”
Rowley, who is curator of amphibian and reptile conservation biology at the Australian Museum in Sydney, described the Knife-footed Frog as “a tricky frog”.
“It will only be up and active when it’s basically flooding,” she said.
“They’re also incredibly poorly known because they only pop up out of the ground in the outback when it pours with rain.”
Five South Australian local government areas were under represented in FrogID data, Rowley said, including Cleve, Franklin Harbour, Kimba, Maralinga Tjarutja and Peterborough.
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“Without an understanding of what’s where, you can’t take these frogs into account in land use planning or conservation,” she said.
“It does give us a good idea of the health of the environment. From every FrogID record, you get a species at a time and a place and a location.
“We’ve been using these records to understand things like the impact of drought, the impact of flood, the Black Summer bushfires and how frogs recovered after that, the impact of human modification of habitats.”
She said the project had enabled the team to make some key scientific discoveries, including that while a few frogs “loved a good backyard”, more than 80 per cent “started to disappear the more you modified the environment”.
Rowley said a team of scientists still listened to each and every frog recording to identify the species, but FrogID was working on a machine learning solution akin to something like Shazam, but for frogs.
“Now we have the biggest database of frogs in the world,” she said.
“AI is great at filtering through and ranking things according to probabilities that it is a certain frog.
“At the moment, it is still listened to by one of us. Sometimes we get some backlogs – it’s not always immediate – we’re going to definitely be prioritising all the FrogID week submissions – but I think a lot of people assume that it is AI and they wonder why it took so long to get a response. It’s because it’s us sitting there with earphones on.”
While FrogID week runs until November 16, Rowley encouraged Australians to continue using the app year-round.
“Especially through the dry parts – and a lot of SA is quite dry – get FrogID on your phone, get ready, and when it does rain, even if not in FrogID week, we need you to be the Johnny on the spot out there,” she said.
“Whether you’re camping or you’re at home on a homestead, you record the frogs and really help us put frogs on the map.”
