New bioacoustics tools are revolutionizing scientific research and enabling much quicker conservation efforts around the globe.
-What Conservation Sounds Like, David Dobbs
The article above spotlighted bioacoustics-enabled research and conservation efforts for the Spotted Owl, a near threatened species with several subspecies found in the American west. A collaborative research team used bioacoustics to determine whether the expanding Barred Owl population was contributing to a decline in Spotted Owls (spoiler: it was).
These researchers recently published new findings on whether owls repopulated into areas burned by wildfires in California. The team deployed autonomous recorders in 1,648 sites (compare that to the 2,000+ Haikubox sites across North America) equipped with the BirdNET algorithm (Haikuboxes also run a version of BirdNET) which greatly sped up the discovery process: the AI allowed them to very quickly screen over 500,000 hours of acoustic data (63.4 years), an astounding and previously impossible task.
They learned that the negative impacts of fire on most owl species lasted a few years, and that low- to moderate-severity fires were beneficial for small cavity-nesting species and Great Horned Owls. The story for Spotted Owls was very different: they avoided high-severity burn sites for up to two decades after a fire event. Spotted Owls face long-term loss of suitable habitat as fires become larger and more contiguous.
This work points out the great potential to use bioacoustic monitoring, like the the Haikubox network, to better understand how environmental events impact birds.