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Hyla sarda, the Sardinian tree frog, also called the Tyrrhenian tree frog, is a small hylid first described in 1853, under the taxonomic authority De Betta. It is a Tyrrhenian endemic, found on Corsica, Sardinia and the Tuscan Archipelago and nowhere else.
Identification
The species’ two common names both point to its range rather than its looks: “Sardinian” for its largest island, “Tyrrhenian” for the sea between Corsica, Sardinia, the Tuscan Archipelago and the Italian mainland that its range circles. A detailed, sourced description of its size, colouring and markings has not turned up in a source this guide could open this run; AmphibiaWeb, which would normally carry that detail, answered every request with a connection error rather than a page, so nothing from it is repeated here. That gap will close once a source this guide can open supplies it.
Habitat and range
Within its three-island range the species uses temperate forests, temperate shrubland, rivers and intermittent rivers, freshwater marshes and intermittent freshwater marshes, and urban areas, a spread that runs from near-natural woodland and wetland to the edges of towns. That range sits close to, but does not reach, the Italian mainland: the nearest mainland relative in the same family, the Italian tree frog H. intermedia, holds continental Italy and Sicily instead, so the Tyrrhenian Sea marks the boundary between the two.
Behaviour and breeding
A sourced account of this species’ breeding season, call or clutch size has not turned up in a source this guide could open this run. The paper most likely to hold that detail, a 2004 study of the species’ advertisement call, sits behind a publisher paywall rather than in an open-access journal, so it is not cited here.
Conservation
The facts box gives the species’ IUCN category, taken directly from its Wikidata item. No further detail on population trend or threats has turned up in a source this guide could open this run.
Similar species
The Italian tree frog, H. intermedia, is the geographically closest relative in the same family, occupying mainland Italy and Sicily, with a small population in southern Switzerland and a western corner of Slovenia, separated from H. sarda’s island range by the Tyrrhenian Sea. Neither the English Wikipedia article on H. sarda nor the one on H. intermedia describes a documented relationship between the two beyond that geography, so this guide does not claim one.