I have a confession, and it won't surprise anyone who's met me. I watch the numbers on this magazine the way a frog watches a fly just out of tongue's reach: dead still on the outside, completely unhinged on the inside (I assume). But the numbers were never the point. The point is the log itself, and who's sitting on it. So this issue, let me turn the flashlight off the counter and onto the frogs.
Lean in. This is the part I've been wanting to show you.
From South Africa, Jeanne Tarrant and colleagues walk us from Red List to recovery with Pickersgill's Reed Frog, proof that "Endangered" doesn't have to be the last word. From Australia, Matt West and his team rebuild Watson's Tree Frog out of the ashes of catastrophic fire, one released cohort at a time. Two hemispheres, one stubborn idea: that we can hand a species its future back.
And close to home for us, Gina Della Togna walks through how the Amphibian Survival Alliance (ASA) helped Panama launch its national Key Biodiversity Areas assessment, the map-and-policy groundwork that quietly decides which amphibians still have somewhere to live.
Abel Batista counts to thirty-six new species and tells you what each one taught, well past the scientific name. Outside Puyo, in the western Amazon, Alonso Chicaiza-Jácome keeps watch over Atelopus colomai in one of the last rainforest patches it has left. And from Áncash, Peru, a single new locality for the Critically Endangered Atelopus peruensis, which is a quiet sentence that means a harlequin frog is still out there.
Kazuko Hase takes us into Tokyo, where the toads and the city are negotiating a truce, and asks what urban communities can actually do. In Kenya's Taita Hills, Fredrick and Jacinta Kilonzo turn Save the Frogs Day into community-led conservation for a warty frog most of the world has never heard of. In southern Chile, Andrés Valenzuela-Sánchez and Soledad Delgado knock on private landowners' doors with a simple pitch: yo protejo mis ranitas, I protect my little frogs. And in central Nepal, Pooja Paudel builds stewardship for Amolops mahabharatensis where it has to start, with the people who share its rivers.
Jenny Whilde and David Duffy go looking for frogs, flies, and fungi all at once, reading a whole ecosystem from a cup of water. Ndimuh Bertrand Shancho and the VoNat team listen their way across Cameroon, turning bioacoustics into collaboration. Zara Shattock traces how chytrid research grew up. Jiang and Yanping Wang ask why salamanders, of all creatures, carry such a heavy share of extinction risk, and what we do about it.
And because this magazine has never pretended the crisis is over: Gabriel Laufer and the team count two decades of an American bullfrog invasion through Uruguay, and Sherlo Adha Maulana watches Sumatran frogs with extraordinary tadpoles slip through the cracks of a changing landscape.
That's barely half the log. Littlejohn's Tree Frog gets a spotlight of its own, so Watson's isn't the only Australian on the log. There's a glassfrog hotspot atlas, a salamander stronghold losing its evolutionary history to the climate, a Critically Endangered Boophis holding on in Madagascar's central highlands, ONG Ranita de Darwin formally joining the ASA, and a From the Journals section that rounds up the newest research in short, plain-language overviews, so the findings reach you even when the paper itself sits behind a paywall.
Here's what undoes me a little. You wrote in whatever language was most natural to you and trusted us with the translation; the amphibians never agreed English was the official language of their conservation, and neither did we. You sent your figures, your maps, your tables, your data. First-time writers landed next to scientists they cite, and everybody got the same shelf, the same font, the same welcome. Thank you. I mean it in a way that doesn't fit in a font.
And to the translators, the proofers, and everyone who forwarded the link to a student who needed the nudge: you're why these stories reached anyone at all.
Just over half a year of building this, an amount of coffee I won't disclose to a medical professional, and a few nights that didn't technically qualify as sleep. Reading what you sent? Toadally worth it. (I'm sorry. I'm not sorry.)
So pull the log a little closer. There's more to read, more people to meet, and more of you in these pages than ever. And to the new faces who just found us: hello. Pull up a log of your own. There's plenty of room, and the water's fine.
p.s. I'll be watching the Issue 2 numbers with exactly the composure I managed last time, which is to say none at all. But this time I already know the part that matters. It's not how many. It's who. And it's you.