The adult male is 21 to 28 mm long from nose to rear end and the adult female is 34 to 36 mm long. It is pale brown in colour with a stripe from its nose over its eyes and down its body. Parts of its legs are pale yellow or orange. It looks very similar to the brown tree frog.[4]
This frog can live in forests or grasslands. It lives in bodies of water that are still or slow-flowing, like creeks, ditches, lakes, and slow parts of rivers.[3]
The plains brown tree frog is closely related to the brown tree frog, enough that they can have babies together when they meet in the wild, though this is rare. Scientists studied the nuclear DNA and mitochondrial DNA of hybrid frogs and they found that it was male plains brown tree frogs mating with female brown tree frogs more than half the time.[5]