Evidence base for adaptive management of American bullfrog in Flanders

The current American bull frog management in Flanders does not have a clear management objective and is implemented very ad hoc. This research project aims to develop a landscape metapopulation model to describe the network of water bodies, their individual quality for bull frog (habitat quality, presence of native amphibians and fish species, etc.) and their landscape connectivity to support management decisions. This model will be constructed using models of bull frog subpopulations in each of these areas, thus allowing the effects of various management methods that are currently applied very ad hoc (fyke catches, shooting, remove the water, sterile male technique) to be calculated. The landscape ecology of bull frog is fairly well known and the Nete population has already been roughly mapped. However, there are still gaps in knowledge about population dynamics, dispersion of bull frog and the spatial extent of the population.