NSF Award
2226886
Estimating animal population sizes is crucial for conservation, especially when predicting how species may respond to changes in their environment. However, traditional methods to estimate populations require significant time, effort and expense, and are often conducted only once per year. This approach is likely to miss within year dynamics. This research, using Adélie penguins and cave roosting gray bats, will develop and test a new method using sound to remotely estimate how the numbers of animals living in groups changes over time. The goal is to develop a new approach to counting animals that reduces hands-on effort, increases the frequency of population counts, and improves data available for species conservation. This project will also support a scientific workshop to discuss data needs and emerging approaches for low-cost continuous population monitoring in remote locations. Lastly, this research will include undergraduate research opportunities for students from under-represented groups. <br/><br/>Understanding spatiotemporal population dynamics, especially for mobile animals in patchy habitats, can uncover fundamental processes that regulate populations across taxa and help predict how animals will respond to disturbance events. Models are widely used to study the population dynamics within and among populations. These models require population counts, which are typically conducted in discrete time periods such as yearly counts. Although yearly counts can be adequate for assessing population responses to longer term press events, this approach cannot capture how specific or interconnected populations will respond to short-term perturbations, or pulse disturbances. More frequent monitoring of multiple populations is needed but especially challenging in remote habitats. Using island-nesting seabirds and cave-roosting bats, this research will test the hypothesis that acoustic energy indices are reliable estimates of population sizes for mobile, vocal animals in patchy habitats, and that with the data from this non-invasive approach can be used to model how animals respond to pulse disturbances. If successful, this approach to remote monitoring could benefit demographic and metapopulation modeling, and has the potential to revolutionize how scientists study and understand species that inhabit isolated landscapes. It would also provide critical data needed to protect species experiencing anthropogenic-induced population declines.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
