Passive Acoustic Monitoring in Amphibian and Reptile Research and Conservation

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is transforming biodiversity research by allowing non-invasive, high-resolution sampling of animal activity, community dynamics, and soundscape change across broad spatial and temporal scales (Sugai et al., 2019; Gibb et al., 2019; Ross et al., 2023). Driven by affordable autonomous recorders and rapid analytical tools, ecoacoustics has grown exponentially over the past decade and is fast becoming a standard method in research and conservation (Hill et al., 2019; Abrahams et al., 2025). In amphibians, particularly anurans, acoustic signals give direct insight into species presence, vocal behaviour, reproductive phenology, community structure, and responses to environmental change (Dorcas et al., 2008; Melo et al., 2021; Boullhesen et al., 2021, 2023a, 2023b; Cañas et al., 2023). PAM is also opening new opportunities for under-studied herpetological systems, including elusive, threatened, nocturnal, fossorial, arboreal, freshwater, and acoustically cryptic species, as well as reptiles, whose acoustic behaviour has received far less attention (Akmentins et al., 2024).



Despite this progress, key gaps still limit PAM’s full use in herpetology. Sampling designs, calibration, and reporting practices remain uneven across taxa, regions, and objectives (Sugai et al., 2019; Gibb et al., 2019). Many studies still need stronger validation linking acoustic indices, automated detections, and soundscape metrics to ecological quantities such as occupancy, abundance, breeding activity, phenology, and conservation status (Ross et al., 2023; Lassandro et al., 2025). Annotated reference libraries and open benchmark datasets remain geographically and taxonomically biased, especially for tropical, highly diverse amphibian assemblages (Cañas et al., 2023). And while anurans have become a central model group, reptiles and non-traditional acoustic environments are still under-represented.



This Research Topic aims to move PAM from a promising tool to a robust conservation practice by generating comparable protocols, transferable analytical workflows, and decision-oriented evidence for monitoring threatened and poorly known amphibians and reptiles. We welcome empirical, methodological, and synthesis contributions covering automated detection and classification, annotated sound libraries, ecoacoustics, underwater and terrestrial monitoring, behavioural ecology, population and community monitoring, and the assessment of anthropogenic impacts such as land-use and climate change, disease, invasive species, wildfires, and noise pollution.

Article types and fees

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
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Article types

This Research Topic accepts the following article types, unless otherwise specified in the Research Topic description:

• Brief Research Report
• Case Report
• Classification
• Clinical Trial
• Editorial
• FAIR² Data
• General Commentary
• Hypothesis and Theory
• Methods
• Mini Review
• Opinion
• Original Research
• Perspective
• Review
• Systematic Review
• Technology and Code

Keywords: Passive Acoustic Monitoring, Bioacoustics, Ecoacoustics, Amphibians, Reptiles, Conservation, Terrestrial, Underwater.

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.