bioacoustics

Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is a critical tool in the monitoring and conservation of native species but until now its use in the detection of invasive species has been under-utilised. We present the first publicly available dataset of invasive common brushtail possum (Trichosurus vulpecula) vocalisations including 3500 annotated field recording segments. This study presents an automatic classification model designed and fine-tuned to detect the presence/absence of possums, achieving 98.4% test set accuracy and F1 score of 0.983.

Monitoring the response of wildlife populations to conservation management, such as translocations, is crucially important for assessing its effectiveness. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) is an emerging tool for monitoring cryptic and elusive species and is increasingly used in the management of kiwi. Inferences from data collected by PAM can be largely improved by occupancy analysis. By modelling occupancy, we overcome the issue of incomplete detectability, which would otherwise lead to underestimating actual site occupancy.

Large-scale bird monitoring can provide valuable insights about drivers of population change across different spatial and temporal scales. Yet, challenging terrain and survey costs hinder the collection of data needed to estimate absolute abundance or population densities for New Zealand’s forest birds. Acoustic sampling is being used more frequently to increase efficiency in avian monitoring and paired sampling facilitates robust density estimation from acoustic data.