IDBR: A Cell-Phone Based Wildlife Monitoring System

University Of California-Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz CA

Investigators

Abstract

Seabirds are important marine predators that consume about 7% of marine primary productivity and are a key link between marine and terrestrial ecosystems. Seabirds are also the most endangered group of marine species, composing 25% recent marine extinctions and 27% of threatened species. Seabirds disperse over thousands of kilometers of ocean to forage, but concentrate on islands to breed, often at extremely high densities. It is on these breeding islands where they encounter invasive animals and other threats that are the major causes of extinction and endangerment. Fortunately, seabirds can be protected by such measures as invasive species eradications, establishment and effective management of protected areas, or prohibitions against overexploitation. Thus, there is a very real potential to reverse the tide of seabird endangerment and population declines and restore their functional role to thousands of island ecosystems and adjacent waters. One significant impediment to realizing this conservation goal is the high cost and difficulty of measuring seabird population responses to management actions on isolated breeding islands. Monitoring seabird populations is made difficult by three factors: 1) the cost of deploying and maintaining survey teams on remote islands, 2) the ability of teams to regularly arrange travel to remote sites, and 3) the disturbance that survey teams can cause while working in seabird colonies. A collaboration between ecologists at the University of California-Santa Cruz Coastal Conservation Action Lab and computer scientists at Lorax Analytical will develop easy-to-use, low-cost automated acoustic sensors for monitoring changes in seabird populations breeding on islands that can dramatically improve seabird monitoring and drive more effective conservation actions. The collaboration will lead to novel contributions in both fields. The instrument will lead to innovations in sensor design and networking software. It will also greatly expand the geographic and temporal scale at which biologists can conduct research on ecological communities in remote locations. Expected Outcomes: By providing a low-cost, long-term, and minimally invasive tool for monitoring seabirds on islands, the instrument will provide data that was previously unattainable with traditional methods. This will greatly enhance research on seabird ecology, invasive species, and conservation biology. UCSC's Coastal Conservation Action Lab will immediately begin to deploy the system in ongoing seabird monitoring projects around the world. Other uses include wildlife monitoring, research in behavioral ecology, measurements of conservation effectiveness, and documenting soundscapes at Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) sites, and monitoring ecological changes related to climate change. Outreach: This instrument will find wide application with end-users in a variety of research fields. The researchers will present papers introducing the instrument and its application to end users at 2-3 relevant conferences in ecology and computer science,and initiate collaborations to further seabird research with potential end users including state and federal wildlife managers, restoration ecologists, conservation organizations, and citizen scientists. The software developed as part of this project will be released as open source at the end of the project. The source code, documentation, and user manual will be available to end users through a project website at the Coastal Conservation Action Lab http://bio.research.ucsc.edu/people/croll/WAM/ , allowing biologists and managers to build and tailor the system to fit their needs.