We're looking to ultimately get ready to release what is an extinct frog in the ACT, was here all the way up to the 1980s but unfortunately disappeared due to this invasive fungal disease that spread around the world.

A lot of work has gone into getting these places ready for these frogs and getting these frogs ready to come back to Canberra.

Chapter 2: The Green and Golden Bell Frog

The green and golden bell frog is a particularly charismatic species. It's one of my favourites. It's this beautiful fairly large tree frog that'll sit up on the reeds and it basks in the middle of the afternoon the sun. Beautifully coloured bright green and gold colours and it has a call that sounds a lot like a motorbike revving up. So really waa waa waa.

Chapter 3: Chytrid's effect

We know that chytrid is responsible for the decline or extinction of more than 500 species of amphibian around the world. The spread and decline started back in the 1970s and 1980s.

That's when we lost a few of our frogs but those impacts and effects haven't yet stopped. We're still losing remaining populations of our now quite threatened frogs the ones that haven't yet gone extinct because of this this fungus.

The amphibian chytrid fungus is really pervasive. The problem is it's microscopic. It actually has a life stage that is what we call a zoospore and that's motile so it can swim around in the water.

Chapter 4: Breaking ground

This pathogen lives in the environment. It lives in the water, it lives in wet mud as well as within the animals themselves. It's an impossible disease to remove from the environment so we need to come up with ways to try and allow the frogs, that the threatened frogs that are impacted by the disease and the disease pathogen to coexist.

We've realised there are certain environmental stresses really common things like temperature and like pond salinity that the fungal disease is actually quite fragile, whereas the frogs can sort of tolerate greater levels. It's allowed us to think can we go out and manipulate the habitat sticking in salted satellite ponds, so we build little controlled ponds that we can elevate the salt very slightly that the frogs love to jump in and get a little salt bath.

Just create some spots in the environment the frogs can potentially escape to that offers a disease refuge to help mitigate the impact of that disease.

Chapter 5: One year in

We're about 12 months in now after phase one of the project which was to set up four of our trial experimental wetlands. A lot of our habitat features have worked really well so really strong uptake by the frogs many have had frog breeding which is really exciting, tadpoles and metamorphs.

So one of our key designs here is what we call bunding. It is really just an elevated area made out of dirt around our wetland that's behind us. Native wetlands in Canberra, most of Australia are really impacted by this invasive fish called a Mosquitofish.

Chapter 6: Bunding vs. mosquitofish

If it's raining heavily think of your local park or something you just get a millimetre or two of rain and those fish can skirt along the ground they obviously can't go up this little hill.

Chapter 7: Frog saunas

The other really important intervention that we've been sitting up around these wetlands are our hotspot structures so these are designed to heat up in the sun to provide a temperature that's really detrimental to that fungal pathogen but really beneficial for the frogs.

We're really excited to say they've worked remarkably well. For a start they've been achieving the temperature profiles that we wanted and really excitingly we've found many of our structures being used by the native frog communities. Our hotspot structure is actually made out of a series of black bricks and they're under a Perspex cover that acts like a greenhouse and traps that heat in. On the other hand here at one of our control wetlands for example we set up the samestructure, these ones don't heat up so these will act as our control for the ultimate experiment when we reintroduce the green and golden bell frog.

Chapter 8: Frog immunisation

So we start here in our laboratories, our dedicated laboratories here at the University of Canberra.

We process all our frogs so we weigh them, we measure them, we microchip them, so that in the future when we release them, when we recapture them at our wetlands we can actually say who they were and link them to a treatment in the past.

After we've processed the frogs we're then able to go through a process of immunising them. So that involves infecting the frogs with a low virulent strain of chytrid and we do that here in the lab, in their tanks under cool conditions which chytrid really like.

Chapter 9: Volunteer day

So today we've been laying out the frog saunas.

Yeah I just heard about it in the local Canberra sort of naturalist groups and thought I'd like to see what's happening with these frog saunas.

Look it's been great working on the project, I do enjoy volunteering and this is a cause that I feel very strongly about. I mean it's nice seeing something really positive happening in the environment.

Anything that we can do to help especially these like really simple elegant solutions that doesn't take a whole lot of money, but it's a really creative solution for the frogs.

Chapter 10: Frog release

Today is a pretty surreal feeling, pretty ecstatic actually so we've just finished releasing the first batch of green and golden bell frogs back here to ACT soil for the first time since 1981.

We've tried to select a few individuals from each source to sort of maximise genetic diversity when we get breeding happening here and we've mixed sexes, so lots of males and females, lots of different sizes as well.

Half of those have come originally from Symbio Wildlife Park up near Sydney where they've reared tadpoles that have come from their frogs that are originally from the Sydney area, and the other half have come from our facilities at the University of Canberra, which are originally from the Newcastle area.

Came up with this idea about five years ago. I've done all the hard work over the years, writing grants, getting all our approvals in place, setting these wetlands up, breeding frogs and getting them ready.

Doing all our strategies like immunising them, and here we are today and we've just let our first frogs go.

It's a pretty exciting and humbling and slightly surreal feeling.

Being in conservation generally I think a lot of people question how much impact they genuinely have and so I think being here, bringing bell frogs back into the ACT for the first time in over four decades, is a truly momentous thing and like I'm genuinely really proud to be part of it.

We've been out to this site and lots of other sites for hours and hours on end, lots of students, lots of volunteers from the community as well so yeah it's a bit of a pinch yourself moment now that they're out.

Chapter 11: What's next

Pretty soon now that we've released the frogs we'll actually start monitoring.

So we'll start to get teams together including groups like FrogWatch and citizens and volunteers and we'll head out to these wetlands and we'll start to survey them, to see if we can re-find the frogs. And when we do that we can scan their microchips and do a procedure called capture, mark, recapture and estimate how many are alive, how well they're surviving and we're able to swab them and see if they've got the disease and put that in the disease context.

So we'll probably survey all these wetlands from now on every month or two to see how well they're doing, and then they go into their first winter.

This is when frogs tend to disappear and this is when the disease takes hold and often sends the population crashing.

We'll have our first idea next year, next spring or summer because if we've still got frogs alive then it means they've survived that dangerous winter period when the disease takes hold and the frogs usually die. We're actually feeling really positive that this might work. Following on from all our results in our laboratory trials and in mesocosms where it's worked really well, holding really high hopes that this is actually going to lead to self-sustaining persistent populations into the future.