Assessment of Amphibian Diversity in Components of the Okavango Delta through Citizen Science and Audio Recordings

The Okavango Delta in Botswana is one of the world’s most valuable wetland resources because of its unique characteristics and biological diversity. The seasonal, annual, and decadal inundated extent of the Okavango Delta in north-west Botswana is highly variable. Therefore, amphibian habitat is under threat from a variety of factors, including habitat loss caused by the loss of wetlands and upland terrestrial habitat, habitat fragmentation, habitat degradation caused by urban pollutants and movement behaviors in the presence of light and/or sound pollution. Previous study showed that there are approximately 33 amphibian species in the Okavango Delta and 24 of them were reported in places surrounding the Delta. Limited research has been done on the diversity of amphibian species in these areas, especially using citizen science and audio recordings. To address this gap the study aimed to determine the amphibian species diversity in the Daunara, Mochaba and Chanoga and compare the amphibian diversity in the different study sites. A total of 24 questionnaires were administered for our research: with eight distributed at each of the three sites to the local people in that area targeting fisherman and canoe (mokoro) operators. The relative frequency of citation (RFC) and Anova were calculated to determine significance difference in species diversity. Audio recordings were collected at each site and analyzed with RavenPro 1.6.5 software to make spectrograms, and Shannon wiener diversity index was used to calculate the species diversity. The results from the questionnaires showed that there was a total of 18 amphibian species identified in Daunara, 13 in Mochaba and 11 in Chanoga. The RFC value showed that the most common species were the Pyxicephalus adspersus (Giant African bullfrog) and Xenopus muelleri (Mullers Platana) with RFC values of 0.875. The p-value from the ANOVA test was 0.962 which is greater than α-value 0.05 which means there was no significant difference between the means of the three groups from the respondent data. The Shannon-wiener diversity index showed that Mochaba had a high amphibian diversity of 1.08892 as compared to Chanoga with 0.63379 and Daunara with 0.67302. Further research is needed to analyze the spatiotemporal variation in species diversity under changing environmental conditions.