Abstract

Identifying how species respond to an anthropogenic change in their environment is crucial to understanding species persistence and best conservation practices. Wood frogs (Rana sylvatica) can be found throughout all of North America in both human-disturbed and remote habitats, and they are therefore an excellent species to use to test the impacts of environmental change on their behavior and physiology. Wood frog mating activity includes male congregation and auditory chorusing behavior (i.e., advertisement calls). I explored bioacoustics methods for analyzing these wood frog advertisement calls across a suburbanization gradient to determine if and how suburbanization affects the pitch, duration, and number of advertisement calls. I present best practices for measuring individual advertisement calls in the bioacoustics analysis program Raven, and I explain my hypotheses and present preliminary results.