Measuring and modeling the seasonal changes of an urban Green Treefrog (Hyla cinerea) population

Green Treefrogs (Hyla cinerea) were captured, marked, measured and released at an urban study site in Lafayette, LA, during the 2004 and 2005 breeding seasons. A statistical method based on a generalization of the hypergeometric distribution was used to derive weekly time-series estimates of the population sizes. To describe the population dynamics, a stage structured mathematical model was developed and compared to time-series obtained from the weekly population estimates study using a least-squares approach. Two fitting experiments were done: (1) Using uniform distribution for the birth rate during the breeding season; (2) Using a birth rate distributed according to weekly data on frog calling intensity. Although both model-to-data fits look very promising during the years 2004 and 2005 and result in similar inherent survivorship rates for the tadpoles, juvenile and adult frogs, the fit that uses the calling data predicts a lower number of tadpoles and frogs in the long term than the one that uses uniform birth distribution. The parameter estimates resulting from these fitting experiments are used in the context of stochastic simulations to derive extinction and persistence probabilities for this population. Due to the oscillatory dynamics (with high amplitude) evidenced by the capture–recapture data and corroborated by the model, it is suggested that anuran monitoring efforts should take into account the natural intra-annual variation in population size.