Summary of Day 2, Summary of Day 2, Friday, November 8 Steve Corn led the Friday morning session, which was devoted to surveying and monitoring amphibians, including an introduction, definitions of terms, and a discussion of issues related to surveying and monitoring, including herpetological databases and a new publication. Definitions for inventories and for monitoring were given. Key issues in successful implementation of a sampling program include accuracy and precision of geographic information, and accurate identification of specimens. Confidence level is lower with observations not backed up by museum specimens. However, photographs and tissue samples help.
Monitoring is generally much more difficult to implement than inventories.
However, program implementation in western North America faces formidable obstacles because many species do not have audible vocalizations, and roads, wetlands, and volunteers are relatively scarce. They identified amphibian atlases, use of data from historic surveys, and field inventories as three main data collection steps to identifying amphibian declines. They suggested restricting surveys to fewer sites, and to check those sites 2-3 times per season to increase chances of picking up all species actually present. Surveying in clusters of areas and classifying habitat would be helpful additional efforts. Peter Ritson reported that visual encounter surveys can be a highly repeatable technique in evaluating the status of spotted frog populations in high mountain lakes.