Australian Museum Partners with Atlassian Foundation to Automate Frog Call Identification
The Australian Museum collaborated with the Atlassian Foundation through its Engage4Good initiative in March 2022. This partnership enabled two Atlassian employees, Geoff Sims and Michael Cooper, to volunteer their expertise in machine learning and artificial intelligence to help automate species identification for the FrogID project. FrogID is a national citizen science program that collects frog call recordings via smartphones to monitor ecosystem health across Australia. With over 500,000 submissions since 2017, manual validation has become a bottleneck. The collaboration aims to develop automated audio analysis to improve efficiency, reduce costs, and expand the scientific dataset for conservation efforts.
Key facts
- The Australian Museum runs FrogID, a citizen science project collecting frog call recordings nationwide.
- Atlassian Foundation's Engage4Good program connected experts to help automate frog species identification in March 2022.
- Over 500,000 recordings have been submitted by more than 40,000 participants since FrogID launched in 2017.
- Australia has 246 native frog species, many threatened by habitat loss, pollution, and climate change.
- Automated identification aims to reduce operational costs and increase data processing capacity for conservation research.
Entities
Institutions
- Australian Museum
- Atlassian Foundation
Locations
- Australia