Want to do something about declining amphibian populations? It's as easy as 1-2-3.

Karen Lips is an amphibian ecologist and tropical biologist. She recently wrote a Live Science op-ed about her experience tracking frog populations in Panama, and those of other scientists doing the same thing around the world, showing devastating declines in frog numbers.

She wrote:

What was most concerning was that even widespread species we thought were relatively stable were declining. This matches with the many stories I hear from concerned citizens who say that they don't see or hear as many frogs in their backyards as they used to. Because those scientists spent the time to count amphibians, they were they able to detect the slow loss in those populations.

We need more studies like these that can go beyond the distribution of threats and can show us how amphibian populations respond to disease so that we can design appropriate conservation and management actions to protect those species.

For example, if population declines are slow and steady, we might have time to experiment with different management practices; but if populations are declining quickly, we might need to establish captive assurance colonies or take tissues for cryopreservation to protect evolutionary lineages.

Likewise, we need to know which age class, sex or subpopulation might be the limiting step in population recovery. If the problem is in the tadpole stage and none survive to become adults, then we might want to design a reintroduction program that adds more adults to the system. If adults are very rare, we might do better to add hundreds of eggs, tadpoles or juveniles to jumpstart recovery.

Numbers are also critical, she said, because the "IUCN Redlist makes decisions on the level of species endangerment based on the number of individuals and the number of populations, and how quickly those numbers are going up or down. The official listing of species is the first step in prioritizing research and conservation efforts to address those threats, and is used to dedicate funding and other resources."

What can you do as an individual? Contribute data to online databases like http://www.inaturalist.org, or get involved in other citizen scientist projects, she advised.

"Whether the frogs are increasing or decreasing," Lips wrote, "we need to know: Just how many frogs are there?"

Read the full story here.

Photo: Conservation International-Colombia/Marco Rada