Citizen science apps have been shown to aid in biodiversity monitoring while engaging nature enthusiasts (Callaghan et al., 2019). For instance, FrogID, an app by the Australian Museum, allows users to record frog calls whose identity is verified by human validators. To date, FrogID has published papers related to monitoring invasive species (Rowley and Callaghan, 2023), informing IUCN red list assessments (Gallagher et al., 2024), assessing fire impacts (Mitchell et. al., 2023), understanding urbanization impacts (Callaghan et al., 2020) and studying frog call behavior (Liu et al., 2022). Our goal is to achieve similar results with Ribbit, with anuran species around the world, and in a shorter time frame. To date, the FrogID team has a backlog of over 18,000 calls, which could be greatly reduced with our app, since the processing time is greatly reduced with the implementation of machine learning algorithms.
During the first round of beta testing of our app, 50 users submitted recordings for identification. Their feedback has been positive: subject matter experts have pointed out that the species they recorded matched the one predicted by Ribbit, and nature enthusiasts have enjoyed the "Frog of the Day" feature introducing them to a new anuran species or allowing them to re-acquaint with familiar anurans through name and most common vocalization of the species.