Australian Frogs

This week we're exploring 2023 data from the sixth annual release of FrogID data.

FrogID is an Australian frog call identification initiative. The FrogID mobile app allows citizen scientists to record and submit frog calls for museum experts to identify. Since 2017, FrogID data has contributed to over 30 scientific papers exploring frog ecology, taxonomy, and conservation.

Australia is home to a unique and diverse array of frog species found almost nowhere else on Earth, with 257 native species distributed throughout the continent. But Australia’s frogs are in peril – almost one in five species are threatened with extinction due to threats such as climate change, urbanisation, disease, and the spread of invasive species.

I played around with some basic visuals like bar charts before landing on this GitHub-style calendar heatmap. I started with the 2023 data provided in the TidyTuesday repo, but then I swapped it out for the full dataset straight from the FrogID website to actually see year-over-year patterns.

copy (
     select coalesce(trim(subfamily), '[Unknown]')  as subfamily,
            coalesce(trim(tribe), '[Unknown]')      as tribe,
            coalesce(commonName, scientificName)    as species,
            eventDate                               as event_date,
            stateProvince                           as state,
            count(distinct occurrenceID)            as occurrences,
            count(distinct eventID)                 as events,
            count(distinct recordedBy)              as users,
       from '~/Downloads/FrogID6_final_dataset.csv'
  left join 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/main/data/2025/2025-09-02/frog_names.csv'
      using (scientificName)
   group by all
) to 'frogs.csv'