BYLINE: Rosalind Essig
The Syrian Spadefoot Toad has been rediscovered in the war-torn country with the help of Syrian community scientists and Illinois researchers.
“Community Science Rediscovers the Syrian Spadefoot Toad, Pelobates syriacus, in War-Torn Regions of Syria” was published in the journal Herpetological Conservation and Biology Dec. 16, just days after a major shift in the 13-year-long civil war resulted in the fall of the Bashar al-Assad regime.
The finding is the result of years of dedication by Yaman Omran of the University of Aleppo and citizen scientists in a country whose recent history has been marked by conflict.
Omran and co-authors — Johnny Baakliny, a Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences master’s student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and Mark Davis, an Illinois Natural History Survey conservation biologist at the Prairie Research Institute — confirmed the presence of the Syrian Spadefoot Toad, a species with an unknown status with no confirmed records in Syria.
The only historical record of the species is a single specimen at the Natural History Museum in London and the nearest confirmed occurrence of the species was in neighboring Lebanon, according to the authors. Omran and Baakliny saw an opportunity to use modern technology and social media to connect with community scientists to “to expand biodiversity knowledge, particularly in underserved communities and conflict zones.”
The effort, with the help of members of the Facebook group “Huwāt al-Ḥayāt al-Barriyah al-Sūriyah (Syrian Wildlife Hobbyists),” resulted in three confirmed sightings of the Syrian Spadefoot Toad in the country.
“These new records confirm the presence of the Syrian Spadefoot Toad in Syria and highlight the potential of community science initiatives to contribute to the documentation and conservation of understudied, poorly known species, particularly in underserved communities and conflict zones,” the authors write.
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