Bioacoustics

Northern spotted owls (Strix occidentalis caurina) are federally listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act and have been at the forefront of forest management and conservation policy in the Pacific Northwest for decades. Recently, monitoring of northern spotted owls transitioned from mark-resight surveys to a passive acoustic monitoring framework using autonomous recording units (ARUs) to detect owls by their vocalizations.

This work is supported by the Pacific Northwest Bioacoustics Lab at the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station.

Publications:

I worked on simulations to assess the effectiveness of different passive acoustic sampling schemes at tracking populations of northern spotted owls using an occupancy modeling framework. These results fed into the current design that is now implemented rangewide. I also conducted a multi-state occupancy analysis to estimate probabilities of landscape use and pair occupancy, as spotted owl pairs receive higher protections under current regulatory frameworks.

Below are some publications I have contributed to: