Tracking Birds

We have installed continuous audio recorders at multiple sites on Carbon Ranch One, recording several million bird sounds annually. Some are arranged in arrays that allow us to localize the origin of each bird sound in three dimensions, within approximately 1 meter. We use the publicly-available Birdnet software developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to identify the bird species responsible for each recorded sound. This gives us a high-resolution, hour by hour, day by day, record of the bird species at each location, enabling us to track changes in their populations and behavior over time, as the ecosystem-restoration experiment proceeds. The chart below shows an example of the timing and location of recorded sounds from 15 of the 115 bird species recorded to date at Carbon Ranch 1, hour by hour (y-axis) and day by day (x-axis) over the course of a year. The numbers on each chart correspond to the location of recorders shown on the map of the Carbon Ranch 1 site. Each point on the charts corresponds to a recorded bird sound, with the colors of each point correspond to individual species (see color key)