From the Alexandria Toadlet to the Yellow-spotted Bell Frog – we’re on the mission to understand where Australia’s 260 frog species are distributed. Version 4 of the Australian Frog Atlas is now released and ready to download, with exciting new updates to our knowledge of frog distributions!

Frogs are one of the most threatened vertebrate groups globally, with 42% of all known species threatened with extinction. The vital first step in knowing how best to conserve species, is knowing where they’re distributed. For frogs, who are generally small-bodied and secretive, this knowledge can be hard to come by, leaving us wondering – where exactly do frogs live?

Atlas of understanding

In 2022, the Australian Museum released the first version of the Australian Frog Atlas – highly detailed distribution maps of all Australian frog species, largely informed by audio recordings of male frog advertisement calls from the Australian Museum’s FrogID project. The quantity of data gathered by people across the country is rapidly increasing each year, with nearly 1.5 million records of frogs now available to improve our knowledge and understanding of frog distributions. So, four years on from the original publication of the Australian Frog Atlas, we’re introducing Version 4 of the Atlas, with an exciting array of new updates, including newly described species, changes to many species’ names, additional data fields, and massive range extensions in some of the most remote parts of the country!

What’s new?

In Version 4 of the Australian Frog Atlas, we’ve updated the known distributions of 76 species.  Citizen science data is revolutionising our understanding of biodiversity and species distributions, particularly in remote areas of Western Australia and Queensland. Not only have FrogID users been contributing to improving the spatial sampling coverage of FrogID (nearly 44% of the country covered – check the current spatial sampling map here), but they’ve also revealed that the distribution ranges of the Small Toadlet (Uperoleia minima), Glandular Toadlet (U. glandulosa), and Blacksoil Toadlet (U. trachyderma) are far greater than initially thought, with range extensions of approximately 75km, 40km, and 60km respectively!