Amphibians are not especially interested in our categories.

We draw lines between forest and farm, city and wilderness, research and action, science and storytelling. Frogs, having declined to attend the planning meeting, continue turning up wherever the conditions allow: in coffee farms, rice landscapes, roadside wetlands, city gardens, reed beds, restored ponds, artificial refuges, and occasionally places where our policies have forgotten to look.

Issue 3 lives in those spaces between the boxes.

Across these pages, amphibians are persisting in landscapes shaped by people, sometimes because of us, sometimes despite us, and often in ways that complicate the story we thought we understood.

The Golden-Eyed Coffee Frog vanished from Costa Rica’s Valle Central as coffee plantations gave way to urban development, then quietly returned in gardens, artificial ponds, and the coffee farms that remained. In South Korea, surveys of the Critically Endangered Suweon Treefrog reveal the importance of riparian reed beds beyond the rice paddies where the species is usually studied. In a historically mined landscape in the United States, anurans persist within a patchwork of forest, water, and developed land. In the Western Ghats, research across cities and coffee agroforests shows that what remains between the obvious habitats matters just as much as what remains inside them.

The frogs, once again, would like us to stop assuming we know where they belong.

But persistence is not the same as safety.

In Borneo, illegal gold mining is turning clear streams to mud. In Madagascar, Betampona’s extraordinary amphibian diversity faces climate change, invasive species, cyclone damage, and an advancing invasive toad. Across cities, farms, caves, wetlands, and mountain landscapes, contributors show us that the places amphibians still occupy are often the same places where conservation law, monitoring, and management are weakest.

That tension runs through this issue: amphibians are remarkably resilient, until they are not. Finding them in a human-altered landscape should give us hope. It should not give us permission to look away.

Fortunately, this issue is full of people who are very bad at looking away.

Conservation breeding has helped return thousands of Southern Stuttering Frog tadpoles to their historical range in Australia. Work for the Valcheta Frog in Patagonia has helped protect 27,000 hectares while supporting local livelihoods and benefiting other threatened species. In British Columbia, antifungal treatment dramatically reduced infection in young Northern Leopard Frogs and improved their chances of surviving the winter. Elsewhere, conservationists are securing futures for rain frogs, Corroboree Frogs, cave salamanders, and the amphibians living in forests, wetlands, and streams under pressure.

These are hopeful stories, but they are not simple ones. One study in this issue found that adding water to refuges could increase chytrid infection and reduce survival under wet conditions. The intervention that sounds obviously helpful may not be helpful at all unless we measure what happens next.

This is conservation stripped of its inspirational-poster lighting. Try something. Monitor it. Learn that nature has objections. Adjust.

Science in these pages gives us better ways to do that. Contributors explore genomics, skin microbiomes, disease dynamics, reproductive ecology, passive acoustic monitoring, camera traps, citizen-science observations, and even the blood-feeding insects listening for frog calls in Taiwan. There is an ancient fossil axolotl, because apparently living amphibians were not providing enough plot twists on their own.

The tools vary, but the purpose is shared: to notice more, understand better, and act with fewer assumptions.

That work does not belong only to laboratories and field teams.

Issue 3 also moves through classrooms, festivals, art galleries, community restoration projects, public-awareness campaigns, and citizen conservation programs. Young people cycle across Bangladesh for amphibian conservation. Communities in Pakistan organize education, cleanups, surveys, and habitat stewardship. Artists in Bolivia bring amphibians into painting, video, architecture, and public conversation. Students and educators in Nepal ask why frogs have become so invisible that someone has to wonder aloud whether they count as animals worth protecting.

They do. Obviously. I recognize that I may be preaching to the extremely damp choir.

Even the Eastern Hellbender’s wrinkles become an opening for public connection. Features some people dismiss as strange or ugly can lead directly into conversations about respiration, clean water, and the health of an entire stream. The problem was never that amphibians lacked charisma. We were simply using an unforgivably narrow definition of charisma.

This may be the clearest theme of Issue 3: conservation happens through relationships.

Between a frog and the microbes on its skin. Between a salamander and the cave conditions that keep disease at bay. Between a stream and the forest around it. Between scientists and volunteers. Between students and the species they have only just learned to see. Between conservationists across countries who compare methods, share failures, and keep going.

None of those relationships fits neatly inside a single discipline, institution, or protected-area boundary. Neither does AmphiBios.

That is why these pages hold peer-reviewed research beside field experience, practical conservation beside art, community campaigns beside genomic analysis. Amphibian conservation needs all of it. It needs people who can sequence a genome, restore a wetland, organize a festival, build a breeding program, test a classifier, teach a classroom, persuade a landowner, or make the public reconsider an animal whose face suggests it has just received deeply disappointing news.

To everyone who trusted us with this work, thank you.

Thank you for the manuscripts, images, data, corrections, late-night emails, revised captions, and patient answers to questions that began with “one tiny thing” and were, in retrospect, not tiny. Thank you for letting AmphiBios carry your work beyond the places where it began.

Issue 3 did not become a tidy story about amphibians living safely in amphibian habitat. It became something more honest: a story about amphibians living in the world as it is, and people working together to make that world survivable.

The frogs still have not read the land-use plan.

We should probably start reading the landscape the way they do.

Candace M. Hansen
Editor-in-Chief, AmphiBios

P.S. If you came here hoping for one simple answer to the amphibian conservation crisis, I regret to inform you that the amphibians have supplied approximately forty interconnected answers and several follow-up questions. They remain committed to being difficult. So do we.