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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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