Using tropical reef, bird and unrelated sounds for superior transfer learning in marine bioacoustics.

Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for ecological assessments. However, high annotation and computing costs limit the field's adoption. Generalizable pretrained networks can overcome these costs, but high-quality pretraining requires vast annotated libraries, limiting their current development to data-rich bird taxa.

Audio tagging of avian dawn chorus recordings in California, Oregon and Washington.

Background: Declines in biodiversity and ecosystem health due to climate change are raising urgent concerns. In response, large-scale multispecies monitoring programmes are being implemented that increasingly adopt sensor-based approaches such as acoustic recording. These approaches rely heavily on ecological data science.

Comparing imaging, acoustics, and radar to monitor Leach's storm-petrel colonies.

Seabirds are integral components of marine ecosystems and, with many populations globally threatened, there is a critical need for effective and scalable seabird monitoring strategies. Many seabird species nest in burrows, which can make traditional monitoring methods costly, infeasible, or damaging to nesting habitats. Traditional burrow occupancy surveys, where possible, can occur infrequently and therefore lead to an incomplete understanding of population trends.

Invasive rat eradication strongly impacts plant recruitment on a tropical atoll.

Rat eradication has become a common conservation intervention in island ecosystems and its effectiveness in protecting native vertebrates is increasingly well documented. Yet, the impacts of rat eradication on plant communities remain poorly understood. Here we compare native and non-native tree and palm seedling abundance before and after eradication of invasive rats (Rattus rattus) from Palmyra Atoll, Line Islands, Central Pacific Ocean.

Vocal activity as a low cost and scalable index of seabird colony size.

Although wildlife conservation actions have increased globally in number and complexity, the lack of scalable, cost-effective monitoring methods limits adaptive management and the evaluation of conservation efficacy. Automated sensors and computer-aided analyses provide a scalable and increasingly cost-effective tool for conservation monitoring. A key assumption of automated acoustic monitoring of birds is that measures of acoustic activity at colony sites are correlated with the relative abundance of nesting birds.