By Katie Scott, Wired UK

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

The Global Amphibian Blitz is a website to which amateur naturalists will be able to upload images of beasties they have encountered 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.

It is hoped that crowdsourcing sightings of these species could give a greater indication of which species are under threat, 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.

Image: Furryscaly/Flickr

Source: Wired.co.uk

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