BIG DATA: Large-Scale Acoustic Monitoring, Long-Term Insights

Strategies, AI, and Collaboration for Wildlife

Large-scale, long-term acoustic monitoring projects require extensive logistics, from recorder inventory and deployment to data storage and analysis. (What do you do with all that data?) Three experts will share how strategic deployment of acoustic recorders, collaborative efforts, and advancements in AI are transforming wildlife research.

Strategies for Large-Scale Acoustic Deployments
Kristina Hammond, MS, CWB | Western EcoSystems Technology

Maintaining a large number of detectors, ensuring consistent quality of data gathered, and organizing large volumes of data can be challenging, especially when the number of experienced bat biologists is limited. We’ll discuss some of the strategies we at WEST have used for small, long-term acoustic surveys, acoustic presence/absence surveys, and large multi-year acoustic projects.

The Sonozotz Project: Assembling the First Nationwide Acoustic Bat Call Library in a Megadiverse Country
M. Cristina MacSwiney G., PhD | The Sonozotz Project

In 2020, Mexican bat researchers, AMMAC members, and mathematicians and computational scientists from CONABIO built the first nationwide reference acoustic library of Mexican insectivorous bats. To accomplish this, we developed a standardized sampling and recording protocol, which we delivered to project participants in three training workshops. Learn how it all came together!

Measuring Long-Term Changes to Biodiversity Using Bioacoustics
Geoff Carss, Wilder Sensing

Analyzing vast quantities of audio collected over long periods provides deep insights into how species assemblages and richness are changing—and how different species use a site or landscape. Hear how we do it at Wilder Sensing, generating millions of species-level records each year, and how this volume of data allows us to ask questions that would be impossible without AI to inform better nature-based recovery projects.