Australian Museum launches the nation's largest citizen science project, FrogID Week, for a seventh year on Friday.

FrogID Week, which runs 8 - 17 November, allows people to understand and monitor the country's frogs, all with a click of their smartphone.

First Nations scientist and FrogID Technical Officer Grace Gillard told National Indigenous Times frogs are one of the most threatened vertebrate groups globally.

"We have 253 native species in Australia and about 20 per cent of those are threatened with extinction, one in every five frogs, which is crazy," she said.

"But the problem is we don't really know that much about them… They're hard to find, a lot of them only come out at night, although we do have a lot of daytime frogs as well. So usually we're not seeing them, we're not interacting with them.

"But the cool thing is about frogs is that while they kind of hard to tell apart just by looking at them… they all make this really loud advertisement call noise, which is basically just mate attractant. The male frogs call and every single one of our species has a different call to every other species. So just by listening to them, you can tell which frog is calling."

In 2017 the Australian Museum developed FrogID, a free smartphone app.

"Citizen scientists record frogs wherever they're hearing them, like they can be going out on special little frogging trips to the Outback, which is fantastic. Or they can just be recording in their backyard," Ms Gillard said.

"Some even will be recording from inside their homes, which is fantastic. It's so accessible to everybody.

"At the museum we receive these recordings of the frog calls and we identify them, and can tell the people what frogs they're hearing. And then we get all this data, which is really good for us conducting scientific research so we can understand more about how these frogs are responding to change over time and how they are doing in their environment."

Ms Gillard said information gathered by people using the FrogID app has helped identify eight species new to western science, "which is absolutely incredible".

"Every November since 2018 - I think it is our 7th year - we have a week where we ask as many people as we possibly can to get out and record frogs… so we can try and get as many frog calls as we can, submitted in a one-week time span.

"It's in peak frog breeding season. It can really tell us how the frogs are changing from this one specific time every single year. You know, it's kind of like that baseline data and we can compare it to a directly comparable time of year."

Ms Gillard told National Indigenous Times frogs face a range of threats.

"Probably the main ones would be habitat loss and habitat degradation, climate change. Most frogs need water to breed, and if there's water drying up everywhere, then how are they going to do that?" she said.

"Also, the spread of invasive species, so especially we've got the introduced cane toad which does outcompete our native frogs, and then feral cats, feral foxes, things like that. And also, the spread of disease."

Ms Gillard said frogs have a very important ecological and biological role.

"We can't have good ecosystems, we can't have good Country if we don't have our frogs," she said.

"We kind of think of them as bio indicators. So frogs… they can live on land and water, and they rely on both to breed, they give us a good indicator of how good both our waterways and our land is. Frogs are like that connecting point between the country and the water."

She said it is "super east" to get involved in FrogID Week, which starts Friday November 8.

"You just download the free Frog ID app, it's available in App Store or wherever you download your apps. You can also visit [email protected] dot au.

"Once you download the app, you just have to agree to some safe frogging guidelines… don't touch the frogs, do your best not to disturb their habitat, clean your footwear and things like that, and then simply open the app any time you hear a frog calling, press record, wait 20 seconds and then you submit it to us."

"This FrogID Week… we're also trying to especially get more frog recordings from areas of the country we don't have frog recordings from previously.

"We want to get at least 50 per cent of Australia covered with Frog ID records because there are so many places back remote regional areas where we don't know. We know absolutely nothing about the frogs that live there, and we want to know more.

"I'd really encourage people to get out, especially if they're in remote areas or if they're anywhere near remote area. We do have a spatial coverage map on the FrogID website where people can see areas where we're particularly looking for more records. Just get out and record frogs."

The Australian Museum notes that Australia has just come out of an El Niño period, and collecting data this FrogID Week will help to understand the impact it has had on frogs and their habitats.

The Bureau of Meterology's climate model suggests above average rainfall and temperatures for November to January, so the data FrogID captures will inform how this affects local frog species.

FrogID has shown that people across Australia can work together to collect huge volumes of scientifically accurate data on our frogs and this can have a real impact not only on their conservation but also help humankind understand the environment in a changing climate.