Continental-Scale Threatened Species Monitoring using an Acoustic Observatory (Old ID 29014)
Role
Principal Investigator
Description
Monitoring threatened species and biodiversity is the cornerstone of conservation. However, it is difficult to monitor land at the scale necessary to implement conservation actions for many species. Acoustic monitoring offers a potential solution, though large scale continuous monitoring of vocal threatened species, and of biodiversity more generally. Monitoring is needed to track the trajectories of species populations, determining whether they are endangered, and to plan and execute subsequent management actions. Monitoring is also needed to evaluate the success, or otherwise, of conservation activities. Our project leverages a large infrastructure project called the Australian Acoustic Observatory (Roe et al. 2021. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 12:1802-8). The Observatory comprises 344 acoustic recorders, located at various types of nature reserves, and some grazing properties, all over Australia. The acoustic devices record environmental sound 24/7, and have done so since mid-2020, and will continue to monitor until 2025 or longer. This provides an amazing resource, but the data needs to be mined to provide information on threatened species presence and activity, to inform conservation. Acoustic monitoring is a relatively new approach to conservation, and projects are required to develop methods and tools to make sense of the huge data being collected. Thus far, we have established the A2O, and are presently conducting a project to do manual surveys (bird watching, camera trapping, live trapping, and active searching) at 6 sites over 2 years, confirming the high quality monitoring capacity of the Observatory by comparing species lists obtained using each method. We have manually detected 5 near threatened, vulnerable, endangered and critically endangered species at only these 6 sites, but there is the potential to detect many more, by searching the acoustic data across all our sites, not just 6. However, this requires automated tools to analyse mass data to provide reports for land managers on threatened species to drive conservation actions. It is these activities that are the essence of our project.
Date
19 Apr 2023 - 30 Dec 2025
Project Type
GRANT
Keywords
biodiversity;vertebrates;Vocal animals;acoustics;Rare and threatened species
Funding Body
Anglo American Foundation
Amount
303215
Project Team
N/A