Bringing frogs back to urban creeks
Published on 21 September 2026
The City of Onkaparinga is restoring 7.3 kilometres of creeks over 5 years in the Field River catchment as part of 2 Australian Government Urban Rivers and Catchments Program grants.
These Urban Creek Resilience and Recovery projects aim to improve natural habitats and bring back native wildlife, including threatened species of frogs, fish, birds, insects and mammals that have disappeared from the local area. Creeks like this play an essential role as wildlife corridors, but the council needs data to be able to monitor changes over time.
Nature Conservation Project Officer, Nikola Manos completed 17 baseline FrogWatch surveys in 2024 and plans to revisit them all in 2028, after the Urban Creek Resilience and Recovery project construction and revegetation are completed. The only species recorded so far are the Common Froglet (Crinia signifera) and Spotted Marsh Frog (Limnodynastes tasmaniensis).
"One of the target species we are hoping to bring back to the Happy Valley and Reynella East area is Bibron’s Toadlet (Pseudophryne bibroni)," Nikola says.
"This rare frog can still be found in other parts of the council area but it's tricky to monitor because if it is present, it's only found in small numbers and does not call very often.
"That’s where we need help from our community. We're inviting citizen scientists to help monitor creek health through free apps such as FrogSpotter. If you live near Panalatinga and Serpentine Creeks, I encourage you to adopt one of the sites and visit it at least 4 times each year. You never know, you might be the first person to record the return of the Bibron’s Toadlet.
'We're also inviting the community to use the 15 photopoint stands that are placed along Panalatinga and Serpentine Creeks to submit photos to be used as a visual record of environmental changes.
'We encourage people to spend an extra few minutes to do a FrogWatch survey through these new signs that are being attached to the monitoring posts."
To find out more about the project visit the Urban Creek Resilience and Recovery Project Your Say page where you can register for updates. For a map of the monitoring sites visit the project Photo point monitoring page.
A version of this story first appeared in the FrogWatch SA newsletter.