Majority of the land on earth is privately owned, but our knowledge of biodiversity has traditionally focused on public land, such as national parks. Citizen science projects, however, are offering new insights into the biodiversity of private land. Gillard and Rowley (2025) use almost 500,000 frog occurrence records from the science project FrogID to investigate the value of citizen science for biodiversity sampling on private lands and better understand the importance of private land for frog conservation. They found that private land was relatively better sampled than public land by citizen scientists, with 86% of records from private lands. Private lands supported a moderately different frog diversity to public lands, and, surprisingly, frog species richness was predicted to be likely higher on private land once aridity and sampling density were considered. Private lands also supported threatened frog species, with 91% of threatened frog species in the region recorded on private land. Overall, this work highlights just how important private lands are for global biodiversity conservation. Read more in The Conversation.

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