The Croak #7 - June 2025

Listening to the Land

Wetland Assessments and What They Mean for Frogs and the Future

Earlier this year, Anura Africa commissioned wetland health assessments at two sites in the southern Drakensberg — one within the Giant’s Cup Wilderness Reserve, and another on the farm that hosts the Splashy Fen music festival. Both are sites where Leptopelis xenodactylus, the Endangered Long-toed Tree Frog, has been recorded in recent seasons. These wetlands are small, often seasonal systems and can be easy to overlook, but they are incredibly significant. For our conservation work to be effective, we need to understand these systems in detail.

Anura Africa specialises in frogs, so the opportunity to learn about the wetlands through the expertise of wetland ecologists at Verdant Environmental, was incredibly valuable and we spent hours in gumboots working with them, analysing wetland soils, recording plant species in vegetation plots, and taking in the ecology from another lens. The Verdant team applied standard WET-Health methods alongside floristic quality assessments to determine the ecological condition of the wetlands, identified historical and current pressures, and created a reference point against which future management interventions can be measured. The findings were clear, actionable, and encouraging.

Anura Africa and Verdant Environmental in the wetlands of Giant's Cup, at the foothills of the Southern Drakensberg.

At Giant’s Cup, a large seepage and floodplain wetland, the ecological integrity is mostly intact. The site scored high across all indicators, with very low disturbance levels, a rich native plant community, and minimal impact from the resident eland herds that use the wetland for grazing. Although there are signs of historical drainage ditches and some erosion features, these have stabilised over time. With good stewardship, this wetland is likely to remain in a near-natural state.

The Splashy Fen Wetlands from the air.

The Splashy Fen wetland is smaller and shows more active signs of disturbance — particularly from livestock access, road runoff, and alien plant encroachment. Despite these pressures, the core of the wetland remains functional, with shallow seeps and sedge-dominated vegetation providing suitable habitat for L. xenodactylus. It’s a system that can recover — and thrive — with the right interventions, such as improved grazing controls, strategic fencing, erosion management, and alien species removal.

These assessments do more than describe wetland condition. They provide a baseline, a benchmark. Now, when we implement restoration actions we can measure whether it makes a difference. That’s particularly important for a species like Leptopelis xenodactylus, which relies on consistent soil moisture, dense ground cover, and structurally diverse vegetation to reproduce successfully.

Anura Africa has already collected a baseline of the population numbers of L. xenodactylus, so we will be able to measure how subtle changes in management influence a change in wetland health, which will promote increased numbers of the Endangered frogs.

It also gives us a tool to speak with landowners. At Splashy Fen, where stewardship discussions are underway, we now have a shared ecological language — one that links wetland health to water retention, grazing productivity, and fire resilience. Grasslands in this region evolved with herbivory and fire as ecosystem drivers, so integrating ecological knowledge on active farms will promote resilience and productivity.

And when managed well, they deliver value for biodiversity and for people.

One of the goals at Anura Africa is to position threatened amphibians as indicators of broader ecosystem function. The presence of L. xenodactylus signals something more than just rarity — it reflects water availability, vegetation integrity, and catchment health. By aligning our monitoring efforts with detailed wetland assessments, we can track not just frog populations, but the habitats that support them.

With the help of our partners at Verdant and the cooperation of landowners, we now have a far more detailed understanding of these two wetlands in this part of the Drakensberg. The research will shape our management recommendations and guidelines, inform the development of management plans, prioritise our restoration activities, and our monitoring strategies going forward. These two small wetlands are a starting point — not just for amphibian conservation, but for thinking differently about the value of seasonal seeps, high-altitude wet grasslands, and the role that landowners can play in protecting them.

We have placed the first two pieces of the puzzle down and will keep adding pieces in the wetlands of the Southern Drakensberg grasslands in the next few months, and we are incredibly excited to see what will be revealed as we add piece by piece by piece.

We'll be sharing photos and further updates from this work in the coming weeks. As always, we welcome collaboration — especially from those who live with wetlands every day. If you farm in the region and would like to engage with Anura Africa, please get in touch. We have a very active field season planned for the Long-toed Tree Frog breeding window and would love to explore more farms and their wetlands.