Mark and his team will be deploying an array of Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorders to listen for shots fired by hunters in the Sucusari, Maijuna-Kichwa Regional Conservation Area (MRCA), Loreto, Peru. The recorders will monitor the spatial and temporal distribution of indigenous hunting, and also detect unauthorized and illegal hunting in the MRCA. The work will enable effective management and protection of hunted species, and help develop a cost effective monitoring method that can be deployed in the Amazon and other parts of the world.
Mark will be using Kaleidoscope Pro with its new acoustic Cluster Analysis feature to analyze the recordings, create anthropogenic soundscapes and determine the occupancy of selected mammals and birds.
Deploying Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorders and exercising the power of Kaleidoscope Pro 4.1's acoustic Cluster Analysis feature, Darren will explore the temporal variation in songbird vocal behavior, and investigate the ability to detect vocal patterns in anthropogenic-induced, noisy environments. Dr. Proppe will share the results of his study with other research biologists and wildlife managers to understand songbird acoustic patterns, and the capability to detect these patterns with passive acoustic recorders, when subjected to anthropogenic noise.
The results will also be used as part of an experimental dataset, using noise playback to assess the singing rates for 19 species of songbirds in the field.
The topic of urban biodiversity and conservation has recently attracted interest among biologists and citizen scientists alike. With the help of community volunteers and school children, Zoo New England and Grassroots Wildlife Conservation, Inc, will spread out among the 65 acre "Wilderness" portion of Franklin Park with Echo Meter Touch bat detector|recorder|analyzer systems to explore the world of bats as part of a biodiversity survey project in the park.
Zoo New England staff will serve as ambassadors and stewards of the park fauna and will work with school children and citizen scientists to uncover biodiversity within their midst.
Data will be collected by visual observation and listening for animal vocalizations and recording them on suitable smart phone apps. In addition to identifying data, locations will be GPS tagged. The Echo Meter Touch allows Zoo staff to include the ecologically important taxa of bats, which they would not otherwise be able to survey, and is well suited to on-site bat work as volunteers can record, play back and see bat echolocation calls on a spectrogram on their iPhones, iPads or iPods.
Hummingbirds face accelerated habitat loss and degradation because of extensive agriculture, urban sprawl and climate change. Given that they're pollinators, they depend almost entirely upon nectar for their energy supply, and their survival is affected by the reliable, year-round sources of nectar-producing plants.
Susan and her team of high school students will use Kaleidoscope Pro 4.1 software with acoustic Cluster Analysis to analyze field data captured during hummingbird migration, and create hummingbird classifiers. The study will investigate the following factors; whether flower plant and nectar abundance affects migration, if bird abundance is related to availability of nectar and patch size, and finally, do weather events affect migration.
Research results will be shared with Hummingbird Monitoring Network to further its work in the conservation of hummingbird diversity and abundance.
The arrival of White Nose Syndrome provides a unique circumstance to better understand the role of bats as biological control agents of agricultural pests. Amy and her team will be collecting bat echolocation call data from Song Meters deployed at 20 roost sites in southwestern Wisconsin. Using Kaleidoscope Pro analysis software, the data will be used to provide a better estimate of the regional and local pest control benefits brought by big brown and little brown bats.
The results will help to refine management strategies and promote bat conservation in Wisconsin as well as throughout the Midwest.
According to recent studies, one-third of amphibian species are threatened with extinction. Suburbanization and associated noise pollution can drive amphibian decline. Drs. Swierk and Tennessen will embark on a multi-year project, using Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorders to monitor entire seasons of frog chorusing behavior at suburban and forested ponds. Using both Song Scope and the new Kaleidoscope Pro 4 analysis software, the team will create song scapes to compare visual representations of ambient sounds, documenting chorus-wide interruptions and examining changes in chorus frequencies as adaptations to noisy suburban habitats.
This is important work as there is a shortage of research available addressing the effects of noise pollution on individual frog species and populations . The study will shed light on species' responses to changing environments and promote public awareness of amphibian conservation. The project will also be part of an urban/suburban conservation education experience for high school students in the Yale Peabody Museum's EVOLUTIONS After School Program.
Wild Basin is a 227 acre natural area, located within a ten minute drive outside of Austin, TX. Dr. Belaire, Wild Basin staff, and a team of university student interns will deploy Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorders at Wild Basin to track changes in bird and anuran communities as the surrounding landscape becomes increasingly urbanized. Dr. Belaire's team will analyze the Song Meter SM4 data using Wildlife Acoustics' new Kaleidoscope Pro 4 software.
Project results will be shared with the scientific community through various publications. Just as important, the study and its methods will be shared with K-12 audiences and the general public in several different ways, including videos that share the process of acoustic data collection and analysis with local classrooms. Datasets will also be shared on the Wild Basin website as part of an educator/student virtual field station. Finally, using QR codes on Wild Basin trail markers, the roughly 10,000 (annual) visitors to the preserve may use their smart phones to learn about the collected vocalizations and interpretive information.
The Australasian Bittern is a threatened species which is listed on the International Union for Conservation (ICUN) red data list as well as on the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act (EPBC) as Endangered. Tootgarook Swamp is one of the few natural freshwater wetlands remaining on the Mornington Peninsula and serves as protective habitat for a species with an Australian population of less than 1000. The bittern is a highly cryptic and secretive species and last year's discovery of calling birds at the wetlands was a significant event. The most effective way to monitor bitterns is to listen for calling birds from evening through to dawn. Mr. Brown will use Kaleidoscope Pro 4 analysis software to detect the distinctive low-frequency booming call of the male bittern from the Song Meter recordings.
Since the call analysis is a critical indicator of the birds establishing breeding territories, the study results will be central to the protection of Bittern habitat and to the reversal of the bird's population decline. To that end, the survey will be shared with Birdlife Australia and the Save Tootgarook Swamp organization to seek further local government planning action, such as feral animal control.
Weaverbirds are renowned for their extraordinarily long and complex songs. Dr. Lahti will be using the Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorder to discretely capture the song repertoires of several individual weaverbirds of six different species. The recordings will be used to perform a detailed analysis of song culture diversity at three different scales: within the individual, between-individuals, and between species-called the macroevolution of song.
This research is unique in that very few studies have ever addressed the concept of song diversity resulting from social learning. David hopes to prove that song diversity can indicate rare morphs and subspecies at least as effectively, and more cheaply than genetic methods can. Dr. Lahti will make individual weaverbird songs available for public use because they will be of higher quality and more specific than colony-wide songs.
Miguel's work will be the first large-scale study of bat habitat usage in urban and suburban settings. As part of the museum's SuperProject; the world's largest urban biodiversity inventory, citizen science teams will use Song Meter SM4BAT FS recorders and Kaleidoscope Pro software to collect and analyze data from some of the 200 "super sites" . The results will be used as part of a baseline study to determine the effects of forage availability, proximity to the urban edge, climate, land use, and land cover on bat activity levels and species richness. Researchers will use the long-term, baseline data with respect to the response of bats to urbanization and other environmental variables in Southern California.
The results of the study will provide data that can inform property owners and city planners how to provide suitable roosting and foraging habitat for Southern California bat species in urban areas or land undergoing urbanization in varying habitats and in varying proximities to the urban edge.
Dr. Fisher Favret's pilot program will introduce elementary school students to soundscape ecology and the concept of Citizen Science. She and her student teams, in grades 1-6, will use Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorders; equipped with cabled hydrophones and the Echo Meter Touch bat detector/recorder/analyzer with Bat Conservation International's Discover Bats! curriculum guide, to explore the marvels of biophony, geophony and anthrophony. Teacher and student teams will conduct soundscape analysis and create classroom content. Karen and her budding biacousticians will use Song Scope software to analyze the acoustic results. The resources and findings will be shared with other schools in Montreal and then in remote areas to support the creation of additional My Soundscape stations.
Mr. Domingos, biologist at the Biodiversity Research Institute (IPBio- Instituto de Pesquisa da Biodiversidade), will be collecting bioacoustics data in the Altantic Forest and offer it through the Observatory for Biodiversity (OBBIO) global network. The Research Institute, located on the Betary Reserve which was constructed by IPBio, is the first station in a larger plan to develop monitoring stations in all of Brazil's five ecosystems. The Betary Reserve will be the first site to use Song Meter SM4 acoustic recorders. The data will be used to evaluate the area's species richness, its quantity distribution, habitat use and behavioral patterns. The findings will also be published in wide variety of conferences and scientific journals and incorporated into Ebooks. Song Scope analysis software will be used for compiling and analyzing results.
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