Evaluation of wildlife acoustic survey as a method to estimate bird habitat quality

Sammanfattning: In the world of birds, the sound says it all. The song, the alarm call, the flight call, and the call for a mate, all makes up a soundscape telling their friends and foes of their condition, mate status and tells the predator that its presence is noticed. In traditional bird monitoring our human ears and eyes are used, with all the pros and cons that comes with the researcher being in situ. But what does the soundscapes of the birds tell us about the habitat quality? If high quality means a habitat with more complex structure, does it mean that the individuals possessing it can spend more time singing for a mate and claim its territory? And less time to call out warning for predators due to the protection the understory and canopy offers? And if so, can we draw the conclusion that their fellow species in open, lower quality habitats, spend more time warning than singing? By comparing the results of traditional bird spotting in six sites outside Uppsala, Sweden, with the recordings of a SM4 soundscape recorder left on each site for 48 hours, it was possible to not only find which species that inhabited the site but also compare the time each species spent on singing vs the time spent on warning for each site. Part from being an ecological survey, of any behavioural difference between habitats, this project was an evaluation of the quality of the recorder SM4 as well as the software Kaleidoscope Pro from Wildlife acoustic. Findings were that the quality of the recordings were high, and that the software is capable of distinguishing between very small differences of song within species. But that the software still needs more examining to see if the issues, such as cutting phrases into far too short fragments of song, can be adjusted by the settings or if it requires more developing of the software to improve the usability of the software’s ability to cluster species. No evidence was found that the quality of the habitat makes the warning more frequent in the open habitats and the singing more consistent in the complex ones.