Biologists Mount Webby Amphibian Rescue Campaign

Katie Scott, Wired UK 1 Jun 11;

Biologists are mounting a campaign to save amphibians around the world using the power of social networks.

The Global Amphibian Blitz is a website that lets amateur naturalists upload images of beasties they encounter on their travels, along with the date and their location. Experts will then browse and filter the submissions in a bid to identify rare species or amphibians found out of their normal habitat.

The initiative has been launched by the University of California, Berkeley’s AmphibiaWeb, which is a database of nearly 7,000 amphibians; Amphibian Ark; the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute; the Amphibian Specialist Group of the Species Survival Commission, which is part of the International Union for Conservation of Nature; the Center for Biological Diversity; and iNaturalist.org, a social network for naturalists.

Amphibian lovers hope that crowdsourcing sightings of these species could give a greater indication of which species are threatened, but in a cost-effective way.

“The distributions of many amphibian species are so poorly known that every observation helps,” herpetologist Michelle Koo, a UC Berkeley research scientist who helps manage AmphibiaWeb, said in a press release. “Museums can’t be everywhere we need to be at once to get the data sets we need. Using social networks to partner with amateurs is a powerful new tool for scaling biodiversity data for science and conservation.”

The ultimate aim is to take a census of “every one of the world’s surviving amphibian species” which, according to AmphibiaWeb, currently stands at 6,813.

Global Amphibian Blitz: contribute your amphibian sightings anywhere in the world