As spring arrives, ponds across Champaign-Urbana come alive with the chorus of calls from frogs and toads. But for local volunteers, those sounds are more than background noise — they’re data.
Now in its second year of operation, the East Central Illinois FrogWatch program allows the C-U community to track the frogs and toads in the area, contributing data that helps scientists protect local ecosystems. FrogWatch USA has operated since 1998 and aims to expand data on amphibian populations.
Morgan Duerksen-Balk, public program specialist for the Champaign County Forest Preserves, and Karla Griesbaum, environmental and energy stewardship educator at Illinois Extension, head the east central Illinois chapter of the program. Both train volunteers and organize timings for monitoring sessions.
“It’s great for individual people to get a deeper connection with nature and participate in science, but for the science, the data can be really valuable,” Duerksen-Balk said.
According to the Akron Zoo, the managing organization of FrogWatch USA, frogs hold important cultural and social status in many cultures worldwide. They also play important roles in various medical fields, with compounds derived from frogs being studied for anticancer and anti-HIV properties.
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However, Joey Cannizzaro, graduate student studying rattlesnake ecology and evolution, said that frogs are facing numerous threats that are causing their populations to decline. These include ecological stressors like the chytrid fungus, a disease that infects the skin of amphibians and kills them at a high rate.
According to Cannizzaro, agriculture is another stressor that can disrupt these animals.
“In Illinois, primarily, we’re kind of a real crop agricultural state,” Cannizzaro said. “But when you do that, you are intensely using the ground for these crops, and you are destroying what we call the substrate layer of these habitats.”
These issues make FrogWatch USA’s participants all the more necessary. Volunteers must complete training to recognize various frog and toad calls. This training can be completed either in-person or online, but all participants must subsequently complete two brief assessments: one on monitoring protocols and wetland ecology, and the other on local frog and toad identification.
Although the tests may seem hard, Griesbaum emphasized that there are only 14 species locally that volunteers need to learn, making it a fairly simple task for anyone to pick up.
Once trained, volunteers can choose the locations they want to monitor or get help from the program to find spots with higher frog and toad activity. These include places like Homer Lake and Lake of the Woods. Duerksen-Balk and Griesbaum are also working with the Urbana Park District to set up monitoring stations within their preserves.
Volunteers can work with friends and family or alone when taking collections. However, for those who want to work with others, the program offers a helping hand.
“If somebody is feeling a little hesitant about going and doing this monitoring work on their own, we can get you together with a group of people who want to monitor in the same spot or have the same kind of availability that you do,” Duerksen-Balk said.
This emphasis on flexibility drives the community science aspect of the program, allowing anyone to join regardless of their identity or experience.
It also increases the program’s diversity. While there still aren’t as many college students, other groups, like younger families, make up the volunteer pool and attend the training.
“I feel like the diversity of volunteers that we get in this program is wider than our east central Illinois mass populace, just because it’s kind of a niche topic,” Griesbaum said. “Some people are really, really into herps, and so they see FrogWatch, and they’re like, ‘That’s where I belong.’”
Programs like FrogWatch USA are essential to data collection and research from the local to the national scale, according to Cannizzaro. By participating, members of the C-U community can help protect not just these frogs and toads, but the entire ecosystem of which they’re a part.
“Scientists, of course, we’re in the minority, so we can’t be everywhere at once,” Cannizzaro said. “So, (there are) plenty of people who have great knowledge of the natural history of these animals, and when they report them in areas that they may not be known to occur, that’s very, very valuable for scientists and conservationists, too.”
The next in-person training session for East Central Illinois FrogWatch will be held on March 24 from 6-8 p.m. at Salt Fork Center in Homer Lake Forest Preserve.
