Area residents are invited to sign up for a course that will be held in Buena Vista County next week designed to track the state’s frog and toad population in an effort to monitor water quality.
A course is scheduled for next Tuesday, April 11th at Gabrielson Park near Sioux Rapids. The course will begin at 6:30 that evening, and is expected to run for approximately three hours.
The training will include images to identify each of the 16 frog and toad species in Iowa visually, as well as recordings to identify them by call. The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is looking for individuals that are detail oriented, and interested in the outdoors.
Frog and toad surveys are conducted three times during the summer. Goals of the survey are to add to the existing data to look at trends over time, update distribution maps, and get a better understanding of frog and toad breeding.
The total commitment time for the summer is about eight to ten hours. Register at the Iowa DNR website. There is a five-dollar fee to cover workshop materials.
Since 1991, graduates of the “frog and toad school” have collected data on more than 22-hundred Iowa wetlands.
