Valeria Aspinall

During the years prior to starting my master’s degree at the University of Georgia, I had the opportunity to be part of a team that described a new species of tree-frog in northern Costa Rica, Tlalocohyla celeste (Varela-Soto et al., 2022).

This frog is currently known from a single locality, an 8-hectare wetland within a private nature reserve called Tapir Valley. In my master’s research, I will use bioacoustics to understand the diel and seasonal patterns of activity of the species and figure out what extrinsic factors dictate its calling phenology.

At the Yang Center, I will be collaborating closely with Dr. Connor Wood to build an automatic detector to answer these questions and use it to conduct presence/absence surveys in surrounding wetlands.