Bioacoustic monitoring on a landscape scale

 

We're excited to be able to announce that ABEL is the lead investigator in a project that will build automated acoustic recognisers for 130 woodland bird species in south-east Australia thanks to an Innovative Biodiversity Monitoring grant from the Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water. UNE is the lead partner and a great collaborative team involving a large number of other organisations to make this happen.

 

As part of the Australian Acoustic Observatory, ABEL lab members are also working with a collaborative team from several Universities and partner organisations to ask a range of questions concerning biodiversity, species movement patterns and how these change due to factors such as annual variation in climatic conditions. This ambitious project is only possible thanks to a LIEF grant provided by the Australian Research Council.

 

The project will consist of approximately 400 recorders collecting data at 100 different sites around the country, 24/7. That is a lot of data, but also a large opportunity if you are interested in big data, landscape level questions and bioacoustics. If that is you, contact Paul to see how you can become involved. As part of this project, the ABC is running a Hoot Detective competition to find owls, and we have recently published details on the A2O and associated data. See here for that information.