Scientific outcomes from FrogID

FrogID is a revolutionary citizen science project aimed at understanding and conserving one of the most threatened groups of animals on the planet, frogs. Launched in November 2017, FrogID is the first national citizen science project focusing on frogs. The project relies on a free app for smartphones, allowing people from across the country to record the calls of frogs whenever they hear them. These calls are then listened to by a team of experts and all species heard are identified.

In the first six months, the project collected more frog records than traditional science had captured in any previous year on record. In a short time, FrogID has collected data on rare and threatened frog species, documented the decline of native frog species, and detected invasive species. It has revolutionised our understanding of the distributions, breeding seasons and habitats of frogs, and dramatically raised awareness and appreciation of frogs and biodiversity in the public eye.

Our team is passionate about producing scientific outcomes from FrogID data.

• Callaghan, C.T. & Rowley, J.J.L. (2020). A continental assessment of diurnality in frog calling behaviour. Austral Ecology. abstract.
• Weaver, S., Callaghan, C., & Rowley, J. J. L. (2020). Anuran accents: continental-scale citizen science data reveal spatial and temporal patterns of call variability. Ecology and Evolution. https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.6833 full text.
• Rowley, J.J.L., Callaghan, C. T. & Cornwell, W. K. (2020). Widespread short-term persistence of frog species after the 2019-2020 bushfires in eastern Australia revealed by citizen science. Conservation Science and Practice. e287. full text.
• Rowley JJL, Callaghan CT (2020) The FrogID dataset: expert-validated occurrence records of Australia’s frogs collected by citizen scientists. ZooKeys 912: 139-151. full text.
• Mitchell, B.A., Callaghan, C.T., Rowley, J.J.L. (2020). Continental-scale citizen science data reveal no changes in acoustic responses of a widespread tree frog to an urbanisation gradient. Journal of Urban Ecology 6(1): juaa002. full text.
• Callaghan, C.T., Roberts, J.D., Poore, A.G.B., Alford, R.A., Cogger, H., Rowley, J.J.L. (2020). Citizen science data accurately predicts expert-derived species richness at a continental scale when sampling thresholds are met. Biodiversity and Conservation. 29:1323-1337. full text.
• Rowley, J.J.L., Callaghan, C.T., Cutajar, T., Portway, C., Potter K., Mahony, S, Trembath, D.F., Flemons, P. & Woods, A. (2019). FrogID: Citizen scientists provide validated biodiversity data on frogs of Australia. Herpetological Conservation and Biology 14(1): 155-170. full text.