Late April in Cambridge, Massachusetts: a small group of people on the edge of a pond in a historic cemetery, standing near a willow tree, eyes closed, listening. They are not here to mourn. They’re here to do science, and what they listen for could help determine the fate of an entire class of animals.
According to a report by writer Cara Giaimo for bioGraphic's Field Notes series, the group was gathered at Mount Auburn Cemetery as part of FrogWatch USA, a national citizen science program managed by the Akron Zoo. Leading the local group that night was Jenni Austiff, a herpetologist at Boston University. They were to listen for frogs, record what they heard, and submit that data to a national database used by researchers tracking amphibian populations across the country.
