Gopher Frog Monitoring Project

The goal of this study was to monitor changes in occupancy (presence/absence) of gopher frogs at 98 breeding wetlands using dipnet surveys and acoustic recording devices (frogloggers). FWRI researchers also wanted to determine the effects of climate, habitat, wetland and landscape variables on the annual occupancy and reproductive success at breeding wetlands. 

Wetlands were monitored from Fall 2015 through Spring 2019. The accumulated froglogger data totals over 54,000 hours of recordings that need to be scanned for gopher frog calls. We use software to pick up the low-frequency call of the gopher frog, but the software is imperfect and the audio must be verified before further analyses can be conducted. In the meantime, we collaborated with the University of Georgia to conduct occupancy modeling analyses of the dipnet survey data.

Read the publication resulting from this work.