FrogID is a successful citizen science program led by Dr. Jodi Rowley (Australian Museum and School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences, UNSW). Members of the public record frog calls on a smartphone app which are then uploaded to contribute to a large, nation-wide data base of frog species distributions (Read more at www.frogid.net.au).
The effectiveness of citizen science programs to document flora and fauna depend on how well the public sampling represents the range of habitats and areas available. To test this, Callaghan et al. (2020) contrasted the number of frog species detected by FrogID (in each 30’ grid cells across Australia) to the number of frog species known from a data set collected by frog experts over many decades. They also considered how sampling could be affected by the remoteness of an area, and the differences among different ecoregions in Australia. See https://www.environment.gov.au/land/nrs/science/ibra/australias-ecoregions for the number and distribution of the ecoregions.
In this report, we answered three core questions on the citizen program, FrogID:
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Does the data on species richness of frogs obtained from FrogID accurately predict the known species richness from a previous, expert-derived map across Australia (Cogger, 2018)?
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How does the number of species (i.e. species richness) recorded by FrogID vary among ecoregions?
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Is the number of species recorded by FrogID affected by the remoteness of the sampling area?