Go where no one has gone before – help us document frogs in the Northern Wheatbelt of New South Wales

The frogs of the Northern Wheatbelt of New South Wales are poorly sampled. We need your help to document frogs and fill in data gaps so we created a priority map to highlight areas where your FrogID recordings will make the biggest difference to our understanding of frogs!

The Northern Wheatbelt of New South Wales is shrouded in mystery when it comes to frogs. Large parts of the region have no documented frog records. If we divide the region into equal-sized 100 km2 (10 km x 10 km) grid cells, more than half of the grid cells have no official frog records from FrogID or any other scientific database. It’s completely unchartered territory! Does that mean there are no frogs in these areas? According to the Australian Frog Atlas, there are likely to be between 23 and 30 frog species in the region. More than likely, frogs are present across most of the region, they just haven’t been recorded.

If we don’t know which species are there, we can’t protect them, and they will continue to be overlooked in land management decisions.

We need your help!

We will be undertaking scientific surveys across the region, but we can’t survey everywhere at once. Some of the region is semi-arid and inhabited by burrowing frogs that only emerge from underground to breed after rain and floods. There’s a narrow window of opportunity, so we need your help to record frog calls when their post-rain breeding efforts begin!

If you’re a local or travelling through or visiting the area, please record the frogs you hear using the Australian Museum’s free FrogID app on your smartphone. With each recording, we can gather important information about which species are present, helping us to refine their geographic distributions, study species diversity, understand the impact of land use on frogs, and identify areas of high conservation value. With more data, we will be much better placed to make conservation decisions that will have a genuine, positive impact on the local frog species.

Every recording in the region will go a long way in helping us achieve this, but if you want to take it a step further and collect the most impactful data, we have created a map of priority areas. Record in grid cells with the highest priority score to maximise the value of your recordings. Highest priority areas are coloured yellow. Recordings from within these grid cells have the greatest potential to contribute to our understanding of the region’s frogs. Refer to the section below for tips on how to use the priority map.

We are particularly interested in recordings from the local government areas (LGAs) of Bogan, Moree Plains and Walgett, from areas with no or few existing records, from sites that are less regularly sampled, haven’t been sampled in a long time, or are far away from sampled areas. The priority values reflect these characteristics.

We will be updating the map on a fortnightly basis with new priority values for each grid cell as sampling priority changes over time. Click here to view the latest priority map. Together, we can gather high-quality data to better understand and inform the conservation of frogs on the Northern Wheatbelt.

How to use the priority map

Each grid cell is coloured according to its priority value. Priority values range from 0 (lowest priority, coloured purple) to 100 (highest priority, coloured yellow).

• Zoom in and pan across the map to view locations and their corresponding grid cells in more detail.
• Hover over or click on a grid cell to view statistics for that grid cell (including the priority value, number of calls submitted, number of verified frogs, and number of frog species).
• To filter grid cells based on priority, tick/untick the corresponding box on the right-hand side of the map. We have grouped grid cells into one of five priority categories: low (priority value of 0–20), medium (>20–40), high (>40–60), very high (>60–80), or highest (>80–100).
• To show/hide the boundaries of the priority LGAs, tick/untick the “Priority LGAs” box on the right-hand side of the map. When this box is ticked, you can hover over or click on an LGA to view statistics for that LGA.
• To switch between light map, OpenStreetMap and satellite imagery, click on the corresponding option on the right-hand side of the map.

Knife-footed Frog (Cyclorana cultripes) calling after rain. ©Gracie Liu

Dr Gracie Liu

Scientific Officer, Herpetology, Australian Museum Research Institute.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the NSW Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water for supporting for this project.

A chorus of frogs in the Northern Wheatbelt. ©Gracie Liu