TRANSCRIPT
It's a small critter, but it's spawning a national movement.
(Sound of frog call)
With more than 240 species in Australia, each with a unique call, chief scientist Dr Jodi Rowley has helped develop a tool to help identify frogs by recording them.
Dr Rowley says after launching in 2017, the FrogID app has seen tens of thousands of citizen scientists jump on board to help with research and conservation.
"One of the challenges was we didn't know that much about frogs, so we were making guesses when it came to what species and what places needed our help. So we needed a frog army; and thanks for Frog ID we have a frog army across Australia that are helping figure out where frogs are and how they are doing."
The free app has become a one-of-a-kind frog database, and it's a hit with children and their parents.
Mother Diana Fernandes says she loves the app just as much as her child.
"They love the iPads and they love all those devices, so if that device can teach them about the environment and frogs and keep them entertained for five minutes that is great!"
Helping people identify frogs in the wild is just part of the project, with now close to a million sound recordings, the FrogID app has helped identify five new species, produced 20 research papers and even inspired an ARIA nominated album.
Dr Rowley says now that they have an enourmous dataset at their disposal, the FrogID team is turning to artificial intelligence.
"We're using this library that everybody's helped create, this library of frog calls, now to train machine learning, artificial intelligence, so that we'll be able to more quickly and effectively identify Australia's frogs."
New South Wales Tourism Minister John Graham says the research is not only expected to continue to reveal the health and behaviours of Australia's frogs, but also the state of the environment itself.
"We know these frogs are giving us crucial information about the state of our country's natural health. We know the climate is changing. There couldn't be a more important time to be doing this research. Spotting these frogs, sending that information back here and learning about our country - and it's changing climate as we go."
It's believed four Australian frog species have already become extinct, and 15 are endangered.
Around the world, 2 in 5 frog species face extinction and it's hoped resources like FrogID could take international conservation to the next level.
But for now, Dr Rowley says they're just excited to reach a million recordings by the end of this year.
"We do have people across the world that are really keen to get similar projects to understand and conserve their frogs and understand their environment better. So maybe one day FrogID will be global. At the moment we're the pioneers in that space. We're doing fantastic so everyone wants to try."
