Photo by Glenn Bartley
Many animals communicate using sound, meaning a lot can be learned if we open our ears to the natural world. In fact, many species are much more often heard than seen, including most of the two hundred or so bird species that regularly breed in Alberta. This, alongside recent technological advancements, has led many organizations, including the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI), to increase their use of passive acoustic monitoring to monitor biodiversity. Passive acoustic monitoring, or PAM, relies on deploying audio recording units to collect sound recordings, unattended, for days, weeks, or even months at a time. The resulting audio recordings can then be processed to determine which species are present. By repeating this process over many years and at many locations, changes in Alberta’s bird populations can be tracked. And it’s not just birds – many mammals, amphibians, and even insects can be heard on the recordings, with the potential for their populations to be tracked as well.
The ABMI, in collaboration with government, non-government, and academic partners, collects terabytes of audio recordings from hundreds of locations across Alberta each year. Audio recordings have accumulated to the point where listening to the full collection of recordings would take multiple lifetimes!
All recordings are permanently stored for current and future use. Typically, however, turning raw recordings into usable data requires processing. One way these recordings are processed is through WildTrax’s Autonomous Recording Unit (ARU) data management system. WildTrax’s online interface allows human listeners to visualize and listen to audio recordings while adding annotations to log their observations. In doing so, a sound recording containing a cacophony of animal vocalizations can be converted into a list of species within earshot of the microphone. For most species, individuals of each species can also be counted. These data have a variety of use cases, including understanding the habitat preferences of Alberta’s species, quantifying human impacts, and monitoring wildlife populations.
Ecosystem Health Projects
One of ABMI’s core projects is the Ecosystem Health program. Designed collaboratively by government and non-government biologists in the early 2000’s, the program is among the most ambitious biodiversity monitoring programs in the world. The basic design comprises a grid of 1656 monitoring sites arranged according to a 20km by 20km grid across Alberta. Within each site, four locations are monitored with both cameras and ARUs. Data on vascular plants, invertebrates, and other taxa are also collected during field visits. Since sites are rigorously selected according to a grid covering the whole province, the resulting data can be considered a representative sample of the province’s biodiversity. The site selection methodology also means that some sites occur in some of the most remote corners of the province, often requiring helicopters to facilitate access. As sites are revisited multiple times, changes can be tracked over time. To date, more than 250 species of birds have been detected through the Ecosystem Health acoustic monitoring program, alongside 8 species of vocalizing mammals and 8 species of amphibians.
Thousands of locations have been monitored under the Ecosystem Health program, with the results contributing valuable information to our understanding of Alberta’s biodiversity. Data is publicly available and can be viewed on Data Discover by searching for “Ecosystem Health”. There are multiple WildTrax projects associated with the Ecosystem Health program, all of which are available to the public for download.
Project funded by: Alberta Environment and Protected Areas, Government of Alberta
Oil Sands Monitoring Projects
The environmental impacts of resource extraction activities in the oil sands are of interest to Albertans. For over a decade, the ABMI has played a key role in providing scientifically credible and independent monitoring in the Oil Sands Region to quantify these impacts. Alongside the Human Footprint Inventory, which tracks visible disturbances from human activity, the ABMI also uses remote cameras and ARUs to monitor the region’s wildlife on an annual basis. Since 2021, the ABMI’s camera and ARU monitoring has followed a Before-After-Dose-Response (BADR) monitoring framework, which is recognized as a powerful and rigorous study design for understanding human impacts on ecological systems. A BADR design involves monitoring locations exposed to varying levels of human activity (the “dose”), before and after development occurs. Since this design incorporates adequate control sites that are not exposed to development and repeated measurements over time, the direct effects of human activities can be clearly identified. Surveys conducted for the Oil Sands Monitoring projects have detected 144 species of birds, 7 species of mammals, and 3 species of amphibians.
Data for the Oilsands Monitoring program is provided through multiple WildTrax projects, one for each year of monitoring. They are publicly available and can be viewed on Data Discover by searching for “OSM” projects.
Project funded by: Joint Canada -Alberta Oil Sands Monitoring Program
The ABMI would not be possible without the strong support from our Delivery Partners: InnoTech Alberta, the University of Alberta, and the University of Calgary. Learn more about the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute at abmi.ca.