Automated Acoustic Sensors for Surveying and Protecting Biodiversity at Scale
Tuesday, February 22, 2022 3pm to 4pm
About this Event
Increasing evidence suggests that the planet is in the midst of its sixth major mass extinction event. In the coming decades, a central challenge for ecology and conservation biology will be to find ways to better understand, predict, and ultimately prevent this biodiversity loss. Meeting this challenge, however, requires a foundation of accurate, large-scale data on species diversity and abundance in the field. In this talk, I will discuss new developments in the field of bioacoustics that are allowing ecologists to gather data on terrestrial wildlife at previously unimaginable spatiotemporal scales. First, I will describe our approach to combining inexpensive field sensors, machine learning models, and sound source localization algorithms for surveying songbirds, frogs, and other taxa in the field. Second, I will describe an ongoing conservation application of these methods, which includes deployments of over one-thousand recorders across Pennsylvania forests to measure the effectiveness of large-scale forest restoration. Finally, I will highlight the potential for these techniques to contribute to new basic ecological understanding of community interactions, population demographics, and species movement.
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