Bioacoustics and AI help scientists hear Australian cockatoos.

Barely a year after the Australian government classified the eastern pink cockatoo as an endangered subspecies, scientists have deployed technology to help study and conserve the birds.

Using passive acoustic monitoring and artificial intelligence, researchers from the Queensland University of Technology tracked the Eastern Pink Cockatoo (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri) at Bowra Wildlife Sanctuary in the northeastern Australian state of Queensland.

“We knew they were foraging there, but we didn't know they were breeding in the area,” said Lola Lange, who was involved in the research and holds a masters degree in biology and environmental science at QUT. have been, told Mongabe. “Now we know that protecting the sanctuary is even more important,” he said in a video interview.

Pink cockatoos, along with eastern and western subspecies, are endemic to Australia. However, the birds are difficult to monitor and study because they live in remote arid and semi-arid ecosystems. Despite their declining populations, the difficulty and high costs associated with monitoring the birds mean that there is little research and scholarly literature that maps their habitats and studies their behavior. “In Queensland, we don't really know why their populations are declining, what trees they like, what food they like and where they're nesting,” Lange said. .

When figuring out how to track the Eastern Pink Cockatoo, passive acoustic monitoring was the most obvious choice for Long and his colleagues. The method of dropping audio recorders, which can collect large amounts of data over long periods of time, has been increasingly used for non-invasive monitoring of animals living in remote areas.

For his research, Lange and his colleagues placed voice recorders at sites in eastern Australia. The study had two parts: one looked at the spatial distribution of the birds, the other monitored how the birds responded to changes in rainfall and temperature increases over time.

For the local part of the study, the team deployed 22 recorders at Bowra Sanctuary in Queensland. They also used four recorders already placed on site by the Australian Acoustic Observatory, an observatory with a nationwide network of acoustic sensors. To find out what kind of vegetation the birds prefer, they left recorders there for seven months last year. “Study of plants is essential to understanding their ecology and making appropriate conservation strategies. Do they depend on specific trees or on certain types of plants?” Long said.

The interim part of the study involved using data from eight recorders placed at three sites in Queensland and New South Wales between September 2019 and April 2021. “We've had some dry periods and some really wet periods. We're trying to see if there's a difference in bird activity with those changes,” Lange said. “Do rainfall and temperature have a major impact on pink cockatoo activity? Will pink cockatoo populations decline further with more extreme weather events?”

After retrieving the recorders from the sites, Lange and his colleagues ended up with about 20,000 hours of recordings for the spatial study and about 78,000 hours of audio for the temporal study. They then ran the data through an artificial intelligence recognizer to identify bird calls and map their distribution. It was this map that pointed Lange and his colleagues to the breeding hollow they found in the shelter.

“There are two large water sources where we were expecting to find more activity, and it seems they are more active in one of the sites. That led us to explore the area more closely, and found a hollow,” Lange said. “There seems to be an overlap of resources in this site: there is cypress, in which they were seen foraging, and many large trees that could potentially be used for burrows.”

Although not yet confirmed, preliminary statistical analysis also revealed another surprising finding: vegetation type was not the biggest variable in bird activity. Lange said she will continue to collect more data and conduct further analysis in the coming months to confirm the initial findings.

“Then, hopefully, our research will lead to the conservation of these birds,” he said.

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Banner Image: Scientists hope to understand more about where birds live and how they respond to changes in rainfall and temperature. Photo courtesy of Sekli Espigole.

Abhishenat Kadingur is a staff writer at Mongabay. Find it at 𝕏. @AbhishyantPK.