Project BD2: Fauna monitoring on North Coast forests

Fauna recordings

Australian Geographic have recently published calls made by koalas, powerful owls and barking owls captured by song meters used in the Coastal IFOA monitoring program. Researchers are developing more call recognisers using artificial intelligence (AI) algorithms to detect other forest dependent species. Learn more here.

The approach

Fauna occupancy monitoring will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of the Coastal IFOA protections and conditions, particularly the collective multi-scale landscape protections, in maintaining species occupancy and the population status of focal species. To achieve this, the program will estimate the trends in occupancy of focal species, such as koalas and other arboreal mammals, hollow-dependant bats, nectivores, ground-dwelling mammals and forest owls.

As part of this work, new fauna call recognisers such as for owls and frogs are being developed. These will be used to analyse the extensive call datasets being collected for the monitoring program and can also be used for previously collected acoustic data sets.

Species occupancy survey design and implementation

A pilot study in 2021 assessed the feasibility of remote sampling techniques, detectability of various species and site establishment for the overall design of the monitoring program. From this, it was recommended that the program establish 300 monitoring sites across the Coastal IFOA estate to provide enough data and statistical power to estimate occupancy levels for a variety of species.

The monitoring sites are located within the three Coastal IFOA regions, Upper northeast, Lower northeast and Southern, with 100 sites per region. A proportion of these sites are surveyed in spring and the rest in autumn to allow for seasonal variation in detectability of the species, for example, powerful owls are more vocal in autumn and koalas are more vocal in spring.

The landscape-scale trend monitoring is aimed at a range of species that can be photographed with remote cameras at bait lure stations and sound recorders are being used to record the species that emit audible identifiable calls along with ultrasonic sound recorders for echo-locating bat species.

Remote sampling of fauna with cameras and sound recorders takes place over a two-week period in each season. Data is collected by the NSW Forestry Corporation and analysed by the NSW Department of Primary Industries Forest Science Unit.

More information on the fauna survey design and implementation is available here:

Further details on the set-up and programming of equipment are provided in the equipment instruction sheets:

Other monitoring information and instructions include:

Progress to date

  • The NSW Forestry Corporation carried out the first season of surveys in spring 2022 and are currently undertaking autumn surveys for 2023.
  • Camera and acoustic data collected have been shared with the NSW Department of Primary Industries Forest Science Unit and species are currently being identified.
  • Data have been scanned and validated for koalas, powerful owl, sooty owl, masked owl and sugar gliders for the south coast region.
  • Call recognisers have also been developed for the glossy black cockatoo and selected priority nocturnal species, including owls, gliders and the grey headed flying fox.

Next steps and timing

  • Autumn 2023 surveys are underway.
  • Identification of species from both spring and autumn surveys will continue to June 2023.
  • Occupancy modelling of the spring 2022 and autumn 2023 survey data and analysis of environmental co-variates will begin in June 2023.