Seabirds are important marine predators that consume about 7% of marine primary productivity and are a key link between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Seabirds are also the most endangered group of marine species, composing 25% recent marine extinctions and 27% of threatened species.
Seabirds disperse over thousands of kilometers of ocean to forage, but concentrate on islands to breed, often at extremely high densities. It is on these breeding islands where they encounter invasive animals and other threats that are the major causes of extinction and endangerment. Fortunately, seabirds can be protected by such measures as invasive species eradications, establishment and effective management of protected areas, or prohibitions against overexploitation. Thus, there is a very real potential to reverse the tide of seabird endangerment and population declines and restore their functional role to thousands of island ecosystems and adjacent waters.
One significant impediment to realizing this conservation goal is the high cost and difficulty of measuring seabird population responses to management actions on isolated breeding islands. Monitoring seabird populations is made difficult by three factors: 1) the cost of deploying and maintaining survey teams on remote islands, 2) the ability of teams to regularly arrange travel to remote sites, and 3) the disturbance that survey teams can cause while working in seabird colonies.
A collaboration between ecologists at the University of California-Santa Cruz Coastal Conservation Action Lab and computer scientists at Lorax Analytical will develop easy-to-use, low-cost automated acoustic sensors for monitoring changes in seabird populations breeding on islands that can dramatically improve seabird monitoring and drive more effective conservation actions. The collaboration will lead to novel contributions in both fields. The instrument will lead to innovations in sensor design and networking software. It will also greatly expand the geographic and temporal scale at which biologists can conduct research on ecological communities in remote locations.
Expected Outcomes: By providing a low-cost, long-term, and minimally invasive tool for monitoring seabirds on islands, the instrument will provide data that was previously unattainable with traditional methods. This will greatly enhance research on seabird ecology, invasive species, and conservation biology. UCSC's Coastal Conservation Action Lab will immediately begin to deploy the system in ongoing seabird monitoring projects around the world. Other uses include wildlife monitoring, research in behavioral ecology, measurements of conservation effectiveness, and documenting soundscapes at Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, and monitoring ecological changes related to climate change.
Outreach: This instrument will find wide application with end-users in a variety of research fields. The researchers will present papers introducing the instrument and its application to end users at 2-3 relevant conferences in ecology and computer science,and initiate collaborations to further seabird research with potential end users including state and federal wildlife managers, restoration ecologists, conservation organizations, and citizen scientists. The software developed as part of this project will be released as open source at the end of the project. The source code, documentation, and user manual will be available to end users through a project website at the Coastal Conservation Action Lab http://bio.research.ucsc.edu/people/croll/WAM/ , allowing biologists and managers to build and tailor the system to fit their needs.
We are loosing our planet’s biodiversity at an ever-increasing rate. This loss has huge economic, social and ethical impacts, so there are extensive efforts to protect biodiversity. Our research was designed to help these conservation efforts by providing a low cost, highly informative tool to measure the effectiveness of conservation projects. Widespread monitoring of conservation outcomes helps funders know which projects and practitioners are likely to yield the highest conservation returns, and drives iterative improvements in conservation practices. We designed a smart phone-based system that can record animal noises for many months at a time while transmitting the recordings back to a lab for analysis using automated call-detection software. We can communicate with the devices though an easy-to-use online control panel to make sure they are working, modify the recording cycle and easily sample data. For a fraction of the cost of normal field surveys, we can measure calls/hour, an excellent measure of relative abundance. The lower cost and simplified logistics make it easier to measure multiple sites, including controls, over longer periods, and with greater consistency than using traditional methods. This approach is particularly useful for measuring the response of animals populations to conservation projects in remote locations where the costs of long-term monitoring are highest. After extensively field-testing the device in the UCSC Campus Natural Reserve, we deployed it on five remote islands in the National Wildlife Refuge system and US National Park system. Data were stored on the phones, transmitted over standard cellular networks, and over the internet using a wireless network, a microwave transmission system and a satellite system. The system performed exceptionally well and the data collected was used by existing monitoring programs. Our wildlife acoustic monitoring device was designed for ease of construction and use by wildlife biologists. It is made of off-the-shelf components and is relatively easy to make. It consists of a smartphone, battery, pre-amplifier and charge regulator (housed in a waterproof box) connected to a solar panel for charging and an external microphone. The device is easy to construct, the needed smartphone code relatively easy to enter and the online control website and dashboard easy to build. We also want to make this device and approach available to wildlife biologists who do not want to build their own devices or conduct their own analysis. We are looking for a manufacturer to build and support the devices at a price that will facilitate their widespread use. We have also partnered with colleagues to start a company, Conservation Metrics Inc., that provides automated call recognition analysis services. Although the focus of our research was to design a wildlife population monitoring device to assess the effectiveness of conservation projects, the resulting device and analyses have widespread utility. They can be used for any research or monitoring projects needing remote acoustic recording. Already they have been used to search for rare and potentially extinct species, quantify collisions of birds with electrical transmission lines and determine the onset of breeding activity on seabird colonies. We hope that by designing these devices and making them readily available, we can contribute to the conservation of biodiversity and to a host of other animal research projects.
