Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program:
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The presence of threatened and endangered species (TES) on military installations often leads to training conflicts and economic costs for the Department of Defense (DoD). The presence of TES necessitates surveying and monitoring to ensure that TES are not harmed or harassed by training. Approaches that streamline and reduce costs of monitoring will be extremely beneficial to installations. Near-time-continuous (NRT) acoustic monitoring could be an effective and cost-efficient method to detect TES occurring on installations. Although promising, NRT acoustic monitoring requires demonstration and validation to understand the limits of its effectiveness and to improve deployment capabilities. Here, we propose to run a series of validation experiments to better understand how the environment and acoustic interference (e.g., from wind or heterospecific birds) influences the ability of NRT acoustic recorders to detect the vocalizations of two TES bird species present on Pōhakuloa Training Area, HI (PTA). Results from this demonstration will improve the ability to use NRT acoustic recorders and inform our understanding of their limitations and approaches to circumvent those limitations.