Australia's Museum launches citizen science project to save endangered frog species

Australia has made its first national frog count a national 'citizen science project' and invited people to contribute towards saving one of the most threatened and 'really important' groups of animals on the planet.

The Australian Museums’ citizen project, ‘FrogID’ gives people the opportunity to not only count the animals but also discover a brand new species. The initiative uses mobile phone technology and “audio DNA” to locate where the frogs are endangered and how it can be conserved along with the waterways. 

According to reports, the museum hopes that the FrogID app would be downloaded by at least one million Australians who will then head to nearby parks, creeks, dams, or even wetlands to look for the frogs. The stats as per the official website reveal that till now, the project has received over 134,200 calls that verified 203,281 frogs and 197 species have already been discovered.

This is the first-ever citizen science project launched by the Australian Museum with the support of Government’s Citizen Science Grants and IBM Australia’s Impact Grants program and in collaboration with various other museums.

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Why the Frogs Count?

In a recent televised interview with ABC, Jodi Rowley, Curator of Amphibian and Reptile Conservation Biology with the Australian Museum, explained that frogs remain “really important” to the food chain as they consume a lot of insects and are eaten by many animals. Australia currently has more than 240 known species of frog, almost all of them are not even found anywhere else in the world. 

However, while some species are flourishing such as Striped March Frog, others have drastically declined since the 1980s. Four, have even become extinct. Thus, FrogID, the national citizen science project is aimed to help the researchers enhance their understanding of the country’s frog population along with monitoring their distributions over time.

The project has called people to get involved either by either downloading the FrogID app and get on the field or by discovering citizens scientist submissions by species and location.

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