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. Extensive monitoring is enabled by the PNW-Cnet model, which uses computer vision to classify vocalizations by spotted owls and other species in the acoustic recordings (pycnet) (Shiny_PNW-Cnet).

This work is led 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 informed the current monitoring 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 than single owls under current regulatory frameworks. Most recently, my colleagues and I used data from dense arrays of ARUs to characterize vocal space use of female and male owls with respect to distance from their activity centers, breeding status, and presence of barred owls.

Below are some publications I have contributed to: