Pondwatch ~ Road Call Counts ~ Special Focus Studies ~ Salamander Monitoring

We’re just getting started this year (Spring 2000) and we’ll continue to grow. We would like to expand our atlassing to include salamanders, which are abundant in BC.

Some more of the projects that will be coming very soon (please email us if you would like to help with any of these):

Pondwatch: This is a great program for school groups and people with a favourite pond (or other wetland). Inspired by the Toronto Metro Zoo's Adopt-a-Pond programs, and Nova Scotia's Frogwatching, it's a long term monitoring project that will tell us about conditions in a certain site over time. A Pondwatching project would monitor the plant life, water quality, birds and other animals at the site as well as the frogs and toads, and could be carried out year round. Although the conditions of a single wetland might not be representative of the province as whole, the information gathered by Pondwatchers can be very valuable for local planning and land use decisions. Major changes in a single site could also act as an alarm system for larger scale changes. School groups can use a Pondwatching project to learn about ecosystems, biodiversity, basic chemistry (as they take water quality measurements) and social studies, as they look at what people can do to help preserve wetlands. We will work with programs like Wild BC, Wetlandkeepers, and the BC Wetlands Society to develop these.

Road Call Counts: This survey technique is being used in most of the North American regions. It allows us to find out where and when certain frog and toad species are breeding: the males call (often loudly) for the females to notice them. Most of BC's frogs and toads call softly, so this can't be our only survey technique, but it will let us compare our results with those from other regions where this survey method is being used.

With frogs and toads, it is often not possible to count actual (or "absolute") numbers of frogs and toads each year. Instead of counting individual frogs and toads, call surveys measure the intensity of the chorus, from no frogs calling to a full chorus. By comparing the relative numbers from year to year, we can get an idea of year-to-year population fluctuations and longer-term trends.

Call surveys will be carried out at fixed sites, such as a local pond or wetland, and along road routes with listening stops every kilometre. It is important that the same sites are monitored from year to year, and best if they are monitored by the same people each year to ensure consistency of results. These surveys don’t take much time each year – just a few evenings in the spring. If you already participate in the Breeding Bird Survey, you have some experience of the method.

Special focus studies: Since there are quite a few herpetologists working in BC, we hope to incorporate their findings into our overall picture of the status of amphibians in the province. Examples of special focus studies are population studies for endangered or sensitive species, or an investigation of pollutants in a wetland and their effects on amphibians. We hope that we will be able to help these researchers in their efforts by offering a pool of interested and trained volunteers (that'd be you again!). Look in your region’s list from the Who’s Who? page to see if there are any special focus studies in your area, or if you are a researcher who could use some volunteers, let us know!

Salamander Monitoring: We’d like to include salamanders in our studies, since BC has so many species (nine most of which are not found anywhere else in Canada). The North American Amphibian Monitoring Program is developing a program for terrestrial salamander studies using coverboards. Many salamanders like to hide under logs and debris, but these hiding places can be destroyed by people searching for the salamanders. Artificial boards offer the salamanders shelter, but can be easily turned over by researchers without causing damage. This is a very commonly used method for estimating salamander abundance.

If you would be interested in helping with any of these programs, please email us and let us know! We’ll launch them as soon as we can.

Photo © Russ Haycock. No reproduction or distribution without permission.