A project undertaken at The Queensland University of Technology, and supervised by Elektra Grant
Tropical forests in the Asia-Pacific region host many endemic bird and bat species. Birds and bats play a vital role in the functioning of these ecosystems. They spread seeds, pollinate plants, and help control insects. In the Asia-Pacific region, these forests are being lost or degraded at very high rates, mainly through commercial logging and the expansion of agriculture. In the Pacific, there is a lack of information about how logging and forest degradation change bird and bat communities, and what those changes mean for forest health.
A major challenge is that many tropical forests are remote and difficult to work in. Forest canopies are tall and hard to access, and traditional wildlife surveys can be slow, expensive, and hard to repeat over time. There is a clear need for monitoring methods that are efficient, non-invasive, and able to be used at scale. This project will address these challenges in Solomon Islands by using sound recordings to survey vocalising animals in tropical lowland forests. The project will work across different sites in the Western Province including logged (degraded) forest communities and unlogged, old-growth ‘reference’ forests. At each site, the team will place two types of recorders in trees. These recorders are designed to capture the frequency range of calls similar to what humans can hear (useful for birds), and the another is designed to capture very high-frequency sounds (useful for bats).
The sound recordings will be analysed and a subset of recordings will be selected to create training and testing data sets. Bird and bat calls will be labelled by experts and experienced local researchers, who will identify recorded calls to species level where possible. These labelled calls will be used to train computer models so that they can automatically recognise calls in new recordings. This is an important step because existing recognition tools often work poorly in regions where there is little local training data.
Further, using these recordings the project will analyse how vocalising animal communities differ between recently logged forests and old-growth forests, and explore what those differences suggest about forest health and recovery. It will examine how wildlife patterns relate to local habitat conditions using vegetation survey information, which will help connect changes in animals to differences in forest structure and disturbance.
The outputs of the project will be to develop a Pacific-relevant library of bird and bat calls and create open access tools that support automated analysis of forest recordings. By building a focused call library and recognition system, long-term wildlife monitoring can be much faster and more affordable across these remote places. The outputs will also provide new evidence on how logging affects wildlife and forest function, and it will create a practical way to track forest health and recovery over time using low-cost, non-invasive acoustic surveys. The project will strengthen local capacity by training Solomon Islands researchers, conservation practitioners, and communities in modern biodiversity monitoring methods. This will support locally led conservation and contribute to global goals for protecting life on land.