VCU news

By Frances Dumenci

As darkness falls, Virginia Commonwealth University biology students stand silently in the rain at the edge of a shallow pool near the Inger and Walter Rice Center and listen intently to a chorus of Cope’s gray tree frogs that fills the night air. This is not the latest fad on campus, but rather part of a national collaborative analysis of land use and frog diversity.

Students taking VCU’s Amphibian Landscape Ecology class, through VCU Life Sciences and the College of Humanities and Sciences, joined students from nine other universities to participate in a coordinated undergraduate research project, “Toads, Roads and Nodes,” to understand how land use is affecting amphibians across the Eastern and Central United States.

The project was developed by David Marsh, Ph.D., a professor of biology at Washington and Lee University, and funded by the National Science Foundation’s Transforming Undergraduate Education in Science (TUES) program and the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS). It is one of the first distributed undergraduate research projects in the country.

“This is the largest analysis of the relationship between land use and frog diversity to date,” said James Vonesh, Ph.D., associate professor of biology and the ecology class instructor and faculty mentor. “The basic questions involved landscape ecology, specifically asking how human land use affects diversity and abundance of frogs.”

The project combined data on amphibian diversity from call surveys conducted by citizen scientists across the Eastern United States over the past 10 years for the
North American Amphibian Monitoring (NAAMP) with data on land cover students extracted from spatial databases like the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s National Wetlands Inventory.

Call surveys recorded the presence or absence of more than 30 species of frogs, as well as data on local traffic and background noise. From the spatial databases, students quantified aspects of landscape composition and configuration around NAAMP survey sites, including the percentage of wetland, forest, agriculture and developed area, road length and whether a frog leaving a pond would have to cross a road to reach the forest.

Each university involved in the collaborative study compiled data from its region of the country. Collectively, the project compiled a data set that included 405 survey routes with 1,620 total sites across 13 states.

The nine other participating academic institutions included Anoka Ramsey Community College (Coon Rapids, Minn.), Clarkson University (Potsdam, N.Y.), Eckerd College (St. Petersburg, Fla.), George Mason University (Fairfax, Va.), Hobart and William Smith Colleges (Geneva, N.Y.), University of Rhode Island (Kingstown, R.I.), University of South Carolina – Salkenhatchie (Allendale, S.C.), Utah State University (Logan, Utah) and Warren Wilson College (Swannanoa, N.C.).

In early April, student representatives from each institution, including VCU undergraduates Ryan Weaver, Chris Crockett, Jennifer Fjelsted and Alessandro Molina, traveled to the NCEAS in Santa Barbara, Calif., to combine regional data, proof the national dataset, analyze the data and start work on a poster presentation and a manuscript to be submitted to a peer-reviewed conservation biology journal.

Other VCU students who participated in the project through the Amphibian Landscape Ecology class included Uswa Arain, Blair Cousins, Max Dichek, Sara Holtschneider, Arthur Kay, Sajan Moktan and Juliana Rostan-Zimmer.

The team presented its findings at the Fifth Annual Poster Symposium for Undergraduate Research and Creativity during VCU’s Research Week in late April.

“Our initial analysis concluded that roads have a big impact on frog diversity, but it is challenging to separate the effects of roads from traffic and background noise. We are working on that now,” Fjelsted said. “We also found that roads may have more negative effects in northern states, which may be due to harsh winters and high use of road salts.”

The VCU students learned to identify Virginia frogs by call (to better appreciate how NAAMP data were collected), to perform basic quantitative spatial and statistical analyses using open-source software tools qGIS and R, to design a research poster, to present their findings and to read research papers about amphibian conservation and ecology.

“Through this project, students had the opportunity to examine important conservation questions at such a large-spatial scale that they could only be addressed through a concerted, multi-institutional, collaborative effort,” said Vonesh. “The ‘Toad, Roads and Nodes’ project has been a great way to introduce students to how modern science often tackles the big questions through collaboration. As questions get bigger and more complex, they surpass the ability of a single researcher to answer them.”


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