Biodiversity Monitoring in Kopački Rit Nature Park, Croatia
Croatia
Overview
Rainforest Connection (RFCx), Arbimon, Fakultet Agrobiotehničkih Znanosti Osijek, Kopački rit Nature Park, and Huawei are partnering on an impactful passive acoustic monitoring project in Kopački Rit Nature Park, Croatia, to better understand biodiversity patterns in the region. The goal of the present study was to use acoustic species identification algorithms, to assess the presence and distribution of wildlife as well as the environmental factors that influence them.
RFCx will provide the hardware and tools for long-term holistic biodiversity monitoring in Kopački rit Nature Park, Croatia. The three year project will monitor ~fifty species across wetland and forested ecosystems. RFCx will develop a regional CNN for the species of interest that will be used to facilitate long-term monitoring.
Partners
Fakultet Agrobiotehničkih
Znanosti Osijek, Kopački rit Nature Park
Huawei
Objectives
The University team will conduct biodiversity monitoring with an aim to collect data on wild fauna, flora and habitat diversity, with an emphasis to survey threatened, protected and indicator wild fauna and flora species.
Continuous teaching and research activities, as well as cooperation with the agricultural sector.
Data will enable insights about biodiversity richness, composition and distribution, as well as the behaviors of specific species.
By doing in-depth surveys of biodiversity, an acoustic baseline will be established to understand both species diversity and distributions.
Implementation
The regional CNN will be run over the data for the second and third years of the deployment, and the results will be available to the University.
By doing in-depth surveys of biodiversity, an acoustic baseline will be established to understand both species diversity and distributions.
The University team will be trained on all activities and empowered to lead both the management of the project as well as continued biodiversity analyses.
One hundred (100) RFCx AudioMoth devices will be spread across the wetland and forest ecosystems and left to collect data for one week to ten days three times per year for each of the three years of the project.
The RFCx team of expert biologists will then remotely execute a study of species diversity and distribution to provide an initial analysis.
The RFCx team will analyze approx. fifty (50) species of interest and create a Regional CNN. The University team and partners will be trained to deploy devices and understand the results of the CNN. The process will be repeated for all subsequent samplings to understand changes in species presence.
The team will be trained in the first year of the project timeline to collect bioacoustics data and use the RFCx platform for biodiversity analyses.
From April to June 2023, our on-ground partners collected data at 95 sampling sites in Kopački Rit Nature Park using passive acoustic recorders. We then used an AI-powered automated species detection pipeline in combination with ecological analyses to derive biodiversity insights from across the park.
We implemented passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) within Kopački Rit Nature Park in Croatia, from April 17 to June 30, 2023, during the birds' breeding season.
To better understand how environmental variables influence species distribution and occurrence, we extracted landscape-scale remote sensing (GIS) layers for our ecological models. We selected these environmental variables based on their public accessibility and potential to explain biodiversity patterns based on previous literature
Experienced biodiversity scientists from the RFCx science team reviewed recordings in Arbimon. They manually detected and tagged species from one day of recordings per sampling site to create a preliminary species list and identify any issues with the recordings
We used the validated PM detections as presence and absence data to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) model capable of classifying species using spectrogram images.
The University team will strongly promote the inclusion of biodiversity protection and conservation topics in the form of raising the public awareness and dissemination of the project results and achievements.
Impact
Deliverables Completed:
✓ Species List - 75 species
✓ Pattern Matching - 54 species
✓ CNN - 53 classes
✓ Ecological Analysis Year 1
✓ Arbimon Insights Page
Highlights:
We detected 75 species (67 birds, four mammals, and four amphibians) across 95 sites in Kopački Rit Nature Park between April and June 2023. These species included the Near Threatened northern lapwing and the Vulnerable European turtle-dove. The most commonly detected species were the Eurasian blackcap, common chaffinch, and great tit. We ran species identification models (i.e., Pattern Matching) for 54 of the 75 species detected and created multiple species occupancy models for 48 species.
In addition, we developed an AI model (e.g., Convolutional Neural Network – CNN) for 53 classes (classes = species + song type) that will provide a powerful method to automate species detection and classification in new recordings, minimizing the time needed for future analysis.
Our findings indicate that sampling day influenced the detectability of bird species. Interestingly, none of the environmental variables we tested exhibited a significant influence on occupancy probabilities at the community level for either birds or frogs. However, at the species level, canopy height and NDVI emerged as the most influential factors driving patterns in bird species occupancy.
For frog species, distance to water and NDVI had the strongest influence on occupancy. We developed an Arbimon Insights dashboard to report, display, highlight, and summarize the main results from this project.
We observed that variation in sampling days was the primary influence on the detectability of bird species.
At the species level, canopy height and NDVI influenced bird species occupancy, while for frogs, proximity to water sources and NDVI played pivotal roles.
This resulted in 1,725,072 one-minute recordings, which were subsequently uploaded to the Arbimon platform for analysis.
The start of this project (April) marks the beginning of spring and has the highest bird vocal activity. This is especially true for Passeriforme species, which are among the most common species in the area. We found that 3 Passeriforme species had the most detections: the Eurasian blackcap (Sylvia atricapilla), common chaffinch (Fringilla coelebs) and great tit (Parus major)
The detection probabilities across bird species showed considerable variation, ranging from a low of 0.01 for the mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) to a high of 0.83 for the Eurasian blackcap (mean = 0.23; supplementary files).
The implementation of RFCx acoustic monitoring technology will enable University of Osijek to efficiently and comprehensively study the sites’ biodiversity.
