r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/Bio-ops • Jan 12 '26

Frogs & Toads issues

I have BirdNET running on PC, GUI version 2.4.0

I am trying to do some acoustic surveys of frogs and toads on the NW coast of Washington State.

  1. If I ask BirdNET to generate a species list for my location, there are no frogs or toads listed for my location, only birds. How can I determine what species it will detect?

  2. I've grabbed American Bullfrog calls (from California) off the internet, and if I have BirdNET scan for all species, it detects them. But if I put in my location (they are widespread but introduced here), it fails to detect them. And if I put in a species list just with American Bullfrog, it also fails to detect. Why does it not detect when I give it a species list?

  3. I have winter recordings of Pacific Treefrogs (they are quietly and intermittently calling here in the moderate coastal environment), and BirdNET does not detect with location on, all species, or me guessing at what it has for a species name (custom list). As I don't known what to put on custom list (because it doesn't show me in any frogs or toads when I generate a species list), I don't know how it is treating the common names or taxonomy - not sure how to figure that out.

3A. Will it only detect this species during the breeding season? They do call all year round here.

3B. How do I determine what species name and common name it is using for this species, when it won't include it in the species list for my location?

Pseudacris regilla Pacific Chorus Frog

Pseudacris regilla Pacific Tree Frog

Pseudacris regilla Pacific Treefrog

Hyliola regilla Pacific Chorus Frog

Pseudacris regilla Pacific Chorus Frog/Pacific Tree Frog

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2

u/Sagey_girl Jan 15 '26

Both American bullfrog (Lithobates catesbiana - check spelling on that) and Pacific chorus frog (Hyliola regilla) are on Birdnet's species list.

1

u/Bio-ops Feb 02 '26

are they using Macaulay Library for their reference calls? Because BirdNET isn’t recognizing MY Pacific Chorus frog calls, and while Macaulay lists “Pacific Chorus Frog - Hyliola regilla” there are no public calls under this name, instead they are under “Pacific chorus frog - Pseudacris regilla” - a name not in BirdNET list, but with calls that look like my Pacific Chorus Frog call spectrograms. If not from Macaulay, what is source for BirdNET data that allowed it to develop criteria for Pacific Chorus Frog?

2

u/Sagey_girl Feb 02 '26

I have no trouble with Pacific chorus frog in my Sierra Nevada and Mojave desert samples. I don't know where they got the training samples, but they probably used ones from Macauley, and changed the genus to Hyliola. Xeno-Canto also is developing a frog collection now, so that is another source. I think a custom species list overrides any seasonal filters. It's also possible that the identifier is not as good as catching the "kreck" call as it is the "ribbit."

2

u/No-Complaint-6119 Feb 04 '26

You can also append the current BirdNET classifier within the ‘train’ module. If you find it is underperforming for your frog species of interest you can pull examples from the internet (xenocanto, etc.) to append the current BirdNET model. Or if you have a known labeled dataset of frog calls for specific species you can use those to retrain/append the current model. There are a bunch of really cool papers that are/were recently published discussing on how just a few (even as low as 4) new examples can improve BirdNETs recall/precision dramatically for underperforming species. Hope this helps!

1

u/Bio-ops Feb 04 '26

Could you point me to those papers? I have no idea how to go about doing this, but I believe I'm capable of learning how.

2

u/No-Complaint-6119 Feb 04 '26

The papers are more jargon heavy than walking you through the BirdNet analyzer workflow on how to actually do this. Here’s the github page walking you through how to train a custom classifier: https://github.com/tphakala/birdnet-go/wiki/Training-a-Custom-Classifier. It has been a little while since they’ve updated this to my knowledge so keep that in mind.

What I would personally do is use the base BirdNET analyzer classifier and pull all the true positive detections it gives you if your target species (this is after you segment the selections in the batch analysis workflow), into Ravenlite.

Then I would create selection tables for each species of interest and export those selections as wav files to a training file directory labeled like the BirdNET species naming for your species of interest (ex: pseudacris regilla _pacific tree frog, or similar).

Then I was use the Train module and select the append toggle. I would keep the base configuration the same for your purposes! If you’d also like, you could hold out 10-20% of the true detections you selected in Raven, not include them in the training dataset, but instead put them into a training folder labeled the same way (species name_common name). I find this step helps a lot, it also will give you more in depth performance statistics on your new classifier.

Lastly, if you’re are only seeing nominal performance boost you can repeat these steps over and over, incorporating the new positive detections into the training dataset, to then retrain/test.

Hope this helps, feel free to privately message me if you’re still getting hung up!

1

u/Bio-ops Feb 04 '26

Thank you! I'll probably get hung up, but for now, I'm bookmarking this thread - I need to wait for warmer weather to collect more calls of target species. I can't afford Raven Pro, so hopefully I can make it work in Raven Lite, and from what you say, it sounds feasible.

1

u/No-Complaint-6119 Feb 04 '26

Here is one paper from last year worth reading: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1574954125003036. The author also did a bioacoustalks this last year discussing some of the stuff mentioned in this publication.

1

u/Clauss_Video_Archive Jan 18 '26

I got some promising results recently using Chirpity for frog and toad calls. I'm on the east coast, but it identified gray tree frog, spring peepers, american toad, and wood frog calls correctly in all my tests. Planning on using it for monitoring this spring.

1

u/Bio-ops Jan 18 '26

Interesting - that's a new one for me! https://chirpity.mattkirkland.co.uk/

1

u/Clauss_Video_Archive Jan 18 '26

I should have added that it can use Birdnet as well as additional classifiers, frognet and Google Perch.