Assessment of cue counting for estimating bird density using passive acoustic monitoring: recommendations for estimating a reliable cue rate

Pérez‐Granados, Cristian; Barrero, Adrián; Traba, Juan; Rosa, Daniel Bustillo-de la; Reverter, Margarita; Gómez‐Catasús, Julia

doi:10.5751/ace-01801-160111

Cited by 8 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 47 publications

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“…We used bird vocalizations as a proxy for activity. This method has been validated by many other recent studies where bird vocal activity was found to be positively correlated with the abundance of birds (see a Review in Pérez- Granados & Traba 2021 and also Ducrettet et al, 2020; Pérez-Granados et al, 2021; Szymański et al, 2021). Using vocalizations to estimate activity is advantageous for many reasons as it allows collecting vast data over large spatio- temporal scales, but it also has its limitations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

“…Acoustic monitoring has been on the rise as a useful method for assessing insect (Penone et al, 2013), bat (López - Bosch et al, 2022) and bird (Pérez -Granados et al, 2021) diversity. This methodology has several clear advantages: it is continuous and does not require the observer to be present and thus the animals are not affected by the measurement itself (Shonfield & Bayne 2017; Gibb et al, 2019).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Species and habitat specific changes in bird activity in an urban environment during Covid 19 lockdown

Sun,

Hassin,

Boonman

et al. 2023

Preprint

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Covid-19 lockdowns provided ecologists with a rare opportunity to examine how animals behave when humans are absent. Indeed many, sometimes contradicting, studies reported various effects of lockdowns on animal activity, especially in urban areas and other human-dominated habitats. We explored how Covid-19 lockdowns in Israel have influenced bird activity in an urban environment by using continuous acoustic recordings to monitor three common bird species that differ in their level of adaptation to the urban ecosystem: (1) the hooded crow, an urban exploiter, which depends heavily on anthropogenic resources; (2) the rose-ringed parakeet, an invasive alien species that has adapted to exploit human resources; and (3) the graceful prinia, an urban adapter, which is relatively shy of humans can be found urban habitats with shrubs and prairies. Acoustic recordings provided continuous monitoring of bird activity without an effect of the observer on the animal. We performed dense sampling of a 1.3 square km area in northern Tel-Aviv by placing 17 recorders for more than a month in different micro-habitats within this region including roads, residential areas and urban parks. We monitored both lockdown and no-lockdown periods. We portray a complex dynamic system where the activity of specific bird species decreases or increases in a habitat-dependent manner during lockdown. Specifically, urban exploiter species decreased their activity in most urban habitats during lockdown, while human adapter species increased their activity during lockdown especially in parks where humans were absent. Our results also demonstrate the value of different habitats within urban environments for animal activity, specifically highlighting the importance of urban parks. These species- and habitat-specific changes in activity might explain the contradicting results reported by others who have not performed a habitat specific analysis.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 83%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Species and habitat specific changes in bird activity in an urban environment during Covid 19 lockdown

Sun,

Hassin,

Boonman

et al. 2023

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Having the exact time of each call also allows extraction of average or maximum power (dB), which can be used for abundance or density estimation using distance‐sampling based methods (Sebastián‐González et al., 2018; Yip et al., 2020). Cue counting models are also useful ways to estimate density around recorders if a suitable estimate of the average cue rate is available for the target species (Pérez‐Granados et al., 2021). However, the sampling radius of an ARU is likely to be important, and obtaining reliable estimates of this is a key process for ARU use in ecological research (Pérez‐Granados & Traba, 2021).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The development of a convolutional neural network for the automatic detection of Northern Bobwhite Colinus virginianus covey calls

Nolan

Scott

Yeiser

et al. 2022

Remote Sens Ecol Conserv

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Passive acoustic monitoring using Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) is becoming a significant research tool for collecting large amounts of ecological data. Northern bobwhite Colinus virginianus is an economically important game bird whose declining populations are of conservation concern, so efforts to monitor bobwhite abundance using ARUs are being intensified. Yet, manual processing of ARU data is time consuming and often expensive, so developing automatic call detection methods is a key step in acoustic monitoring. We present here the first single species convolutional neural network (CNN) developed purely for automatic bobwhite covey call identification and classification. We demonstrate the value of meaningful data augmentation by including nontarget calls and background noise into our training dataset, as well as evaluating alternative CNN score thresholds and model extrapolation performance. We trained our CNN on 6,682 manually labeled covey calls across three groups of sites within the southeastern USA. Precision and AUC from both CNN classification and individual call detection was high (0.80-0.99), and our model showed strong extrapolation ability across site groups. However, extrapolation performance significantly decreased for sites that were more dissimilar to the training data set if our meaningful data augmentation process was omitted. Our CNN detected significantly more covey calls than manual labeling using Raven Pro software, and processing time was greatly reduced: a single one hour wav file can be now analyzed by the CNN in roughly eight seconds. We also demonstrate using a simple case study that extremely high variability in estimates of bobwhite site occupancy and detection are obtained depending on the method of acoustic data processing (manual versus CNN). Our results suggest that our CNN provides robust and time-saving analysis of bobwhite covey call acoustic data and can be applied to future research and monitoring projects with high confidence in the performance of the model.

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“…Cue rates can vary with breeding status (Upham‐Mills et al., 2020), resource availability, and the presence of competitors and predators (Clay et al., 2012; Morales et al., 2014; Wheatcroft, 2015), and have been used to estimate absolute bird abundance in some methodological approaches (e.g. cue counting: Sebastián‐González et al., 2018; Pérez‐Granados et al., 2021; sonogram analysis: Drake et al., 2016).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

How to count bird calls? Vocal activity indices may provide different insights into bird abundance and behaviour depending on species traits

Hutschenreiter,

Andresen,

Briseño‐Jaramillo

et al. 2024

Methods Ecol Evol

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Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become an important tool for surveying birds, and there is a growing demand for approaches to obtain abundance and behavioural information from PAM recordings. Changes in bird populations have been assessed by counting recorded calls and calculating the vocal activity rate (VAR, i.e. the number of calls per recording time). However, bird calls could be counted in various ways and depending on species traits, these call counts could give us different insights on bird abundance, vocal behaviour and/or habitat use. Our study had two goals: (1) to present and evaluate two new indices based on call counts, the detection rate (DR, i.e. the number of 1‐min recordings in which the presence of a target vocalization is detected) and the maximum count per minute (MAX, i.e. the maximum number of calls found in a 1‐min recording); and (2) to present a conceptual framework showing how the interpretations of VAR, DR and MAX could depend on the index and on species traits. For three Neotropical bird species with distinct traits, we calculated VAR, DR and MAX based on PAM data from 25 sites in the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico) that varied in their degree of anthropogenic habitat disturbance. We found moderate to high correlations between the indices and higher temporal variability in VAR compared to DR and MAX. We also found different effect sizes of habitat disturbance on the three species and indices. We suggest that DR might be a more reliable index of relative abundance than VAR for species whose calling behaviour exhibits a high cue rate and that MAX may be suitable for estimating family or flock size in gregarious birds. Our findings show the potential usefulness of developing new indices based on call counts to generate ecological hypotheses and assess changes in bird abundance and behaviour.

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Assessment of cue counting for estimating bird density using passive acoustic monitoring: recommendations for estimating a reliable cue rate

Cited by 8 publications

References 47 publications

Species and habitat specific changes in bird activity in an urban environment during Covid 19 lockdown

Species and habitat specific changes in bird activity in an urban environment during Covid 19 lockdown

The development of a convolutional neural network for the automatic detection of Northern Bobwhite Colinus virginianus covey calls

How to count bird calls? Vocal activity indices may provide different insights into bird abundance and behaviour depending on species traits

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