Drones and sound recorders increase the number of bird species identified: A combined surveys approach

Fischer, Sarah; Edwards, Andrew C.; Garnett, Stephen T.; Whiteside, Timothy G.; Weber, Patrice

doi:10.1016/j.ecoinf.2023.101988

Cited by 12 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 35 publications

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“…Highly flammable tropical savanna woodlands are the dominant habitat in the greater Darwin region with other habitats including monsoon forests, both wet (alongside waterbodies) and dry, large areas of mangrove vegetation and tracts of green space containing native and introduced tropical plant species supporting an array of fauna (Brock & Dunlop, 1988;McCrie & Noske, 2015). Species detectability was examined overall and within the different habitat types and is described fully in Fischer et al (2023).…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

The interaction between land‐use change and fire regimes, directly and indirectly, affects the urban avian assemblages of Darwin, Australia

Fischer

Edwards

Garnett

et al. 2023

Ecology and Evolution

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The interaction between environmental stressors may be a greater threat to biota than any individual ecological threat on its own. Land‐use change and inappropriate fire regimes are known to pose great challenges to biodiversity conservation worldwide. Despite much research being conducted into their singular impacts on ecosystems, very few have investigated how their interaction may be affecting the biota of a region. We used data from surveys in 1998/2000 and 2019/2020 to compare the feeding guild assemblages of bird communities in different habitats within the greater Darwin region. By compiling two sets of spatial data, land‐use change, and fire history mapping, we were able to investigate their interaction and impact on the avian assemblages in the Darwin urban area. Using Generalized Linear Mixed Models (GLMM) we found that an increase in urbanization significantly affected fire occurrence across study sites. Furthermore, we found that the interaction between land‐use change and fire regimes had a significant effect on species that primarily feed on fruit. We conclude that while an increase in urbanization did not directly affect the avian assemblages, the impact of land‐use change on the fire regimes indirectly impacted urban bird community structures.

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Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

The interaction between land‐use change and fire regimes, directly and indirectly, affects the urban avian assemblages of Darwin, Australia

Fischer

Edwards

Garnett

et al. 2023

Ecology and Evolution

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“…As for the drone, most studies (Ednie et al, 2021;Fischer et al, 2021Fischer et al, , 2023Michez et al, 2021;Wilson et al, 2017) used DJI Phantom for the monitoring task, a popular multi-rotor model on the commercial market. One exception (Broset, 2018) used a self-made fixed-wing drone, which generates less ego-noise but is not able to hover in the air.…”

Section: Bioacoustic Monitoring Using Dronesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Multi-rotor drones, in contrast, can hover stably in the air but produce stronger ego-noise. For the recording device, all current studies of bird monitoring (Broset, 2018;Fischer et al, 2021Fischer et al, , 2023Michez et al, 2021;Wilson et al, 2017) used Zoom H1 to record the bird calls, benefiting from its low weight (<100 g) and ease of operation. Recent studies of bat monitoring (Ednie et al, 2021;Michez et al, 2021) used AudioMoth and Echometer to record the bat call, due to their wide range of frequency responses.…”

Section: Bioacoustic Monitoring Using Dronesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Interestingly, to reduce the impact of the ego-noise on sound recording, all studies on bird monitoring (Broset, 2018;Fischer et al, 2021Fischer et al, , 2023Michez et al, 2021;Wilson et al, 2017) suspended the recorder beneath the drone body with a long rope of 8 m. This strategy was initiated by (Wilson et al, 2017) and followed in other works published later. Since the intensity of sound decays with distance, this set-up can suppress the ego-noise by up to 30 dB in comparison with a recorder mounted on the drone body (assuming the recorder-propeller distance is roughly 0.25 m and the power declines quadratically with distance).…”

Section: Bioacoustic Monitoring Using Dronesmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Drone audition for bioacoustic monitoring

Wang,

Clayton,

Rossberg

2023

Methods Ecol Evol

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Multi‐rotor drones equipped with acoustic sensors have great potential for bioacoustically monitoring vocal species in the environment for biodiversity conservation. The bottleneck of this emerging technology is the ego‐noise from the rotating motors and propellers, which can completely mask the target sound and make sound recordings unusable for further analysis. The ego‐noise not only degrades the performance of bioacoustic monitoring but also impacts the behaviour of target species if the drone is too close to the target area. In this paper, we address this challenging problem by combining hardware and software solutions that minimize the impact of drone ego‐noise on bioacoustic monitoring. To collect the target sound from the ground, we used a shotgun microphone recording system suspended underneath the drone body with a wire rope (steel fishing line) of length 2 m. The suspended rope puts a large distance between the drone and the recorder, reducing the propeller sound perceived by the microphone. The shotgun microphone enables the sound to be picked up from the ground effectively while rejecting the drone sound from above. We further developed a software solution that aims to automatically recognize the bird species from the bird call recording and we proposed a noise‐augmented training scheme to improve the robustness of bird recognition in the presence of strong drone noise. We evaluated the performance of the system in a test problem of recognizing 20 bird species with in‐flight recordings, where a loudspeaker on the ground simulates bird calls. The recordings were obtained using a drone hovering at various altitudes ranging from 5 to 30 m. By combining the hardware and software solutions, the system recognizes birds robustly at an altitude of 30 m and signal‐to‐noise ratio −25 dB. This demonstrates the feasibility of our drone audition system for bioacoustic monitoring. The proposed method overcomes a long‐standing bottleneck problem in drone audition and promises new applications of bioacoustic monitoring in research and management.

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“…This enabled us to record the dawn chorus, the time of day when most birds vocalize frequently, which typically begins about 30 to 60 minutes before sunrise in temperate regions (Staicer et al 1996). Other studies have reported AudioMoth's can detect bird vocalizations up to 25 -50 m away from the recorder (Campos-Cerqueira et al 2021;Fischer et al 2021) but maximum detection distance will vary depending on the song's amplitude and frequency and environmental features such as vegetation type, temperature, and pressure (Gibb et al 2019). Though AudioMoths may detect some species more easily than others, since only AudioMoth recorders were used and they were placed in similar forest conditions at each site, we do not expect this to alter our results.…”

Section: Bird Data Collectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Forest Amount, Not Fragmentation or Connectivity, Increases Bird Species Richness

Hajdasz¹

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Though habitat amount, fragmentation and connectivity are considered important for biodiversity, it is unclear whether fragmentation or connectivity have strong effects on biodiversity independent of habitat amount. We aimed to determine the independent effects of these variables on species richness and presence of forest birds in Eastern Ontario, Canada. We selected 70 sites where landscape habitat amount, fragmentation and structural connectivity were uncorrelated with each other. We determined bird

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Drones and sound recorders increase the number of bird species identified: A combined surveys approach

Cited by 12 publications

References 35 publications

The interaction between land‐use change and fire regimes, directly and indirectly, affects the urban avian assemblages of Darwin, Australia

The interaction between land‐use change and fire regimes, directly and indirectly, affects the urban avian assemblages of Darwin, Australia

Drone audition for bioacoustic monitoring

Forest Amount, Not Fragmentation or Connectivity, Increases Bird Species Richness

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