Citizen scientists have been called on to help Australian researchers make the leap past a million frog croak recordings.
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FrogID is a one-of-a-kind portable project developed by scientist Jodi Rowley and Australian Museum director Kim McKay in 2017.
"Froggers" can use a sophisticated but simple-to-use smart phone app to contribute to conservation.
All these budding scientists need to do is find and record frog calls on the app, which sends the croaks directly to Australian Museum scientists who identify each frog species calling.
The in-built GPS makes it easy to identify the location of each frog call.
While froggers have helped the scientists mapped much of the country, Dr Rowley said there were some areas where frogs had been hiding from researchers.
"We are still keen to have help gathering calls particularly from the Kimberley across to the Top End, from Sydney down to the south coast; the far southwestern point of WA, and remote parts of South Australia," she said
The project has chalked up 965,000 frog recordings and helped identify five new frog species: the western laughing frog, screaming tree frog, slender bleating frog, Spalding's rocket frog, and Otway smooth frog.
It has also discovered that some frogs have accents, that about 40 per cent of frogs live near farm dams, and the tusked frog, which was previously feared extinct from NSW's New England Tablelands, lives near Tenterfield.
FrogID has also become a multi-award winning conservation initiative that's yielded more than 20 scientific papers, and even inspired an ARIA-nominated album.
NSW Arts Minister John Graham expects an army of froggers to help the database leapfrog the one million frog call mark by the end of the year.
"The more we can get, the more we learn. There's about a third of the country where we don't know much," he said on Saturday.
"These frogs are giving us crucial information about the state of our country's natural health."
With one in five frog species in Australia threatened with extinction, Dr Rowley said the project would help scientists understand and conserve them.
Australian Associated Press
