The University of Wisconsin and Cornell Lab of Ornithology, with support from the US Forest Service and National Park Service, have been conducting a bioacoustic monitoring program for California Spotted Owls and avian communities across the northern Sierra Nevada since 2018 and most of the west slope of the Sierra Nevada since 2021.
As part of this program, Autonomous Recording Units (ARUs) are deployed at approximately 1700 sites for about 5 weeks during the late spring and summer and collect audio data from 6 pm to 9 am.
This data hub, funded by NASA's Ecological Conservation program and created by the University of Wisconsin Department of Information Technology, provides the conservation community with the ability to download the raw audio data for user-specific applications. If you would like to download audio data, please register for an account and describe your request - both how the data will be used and how many "ARU-years" are being requested.
An ARU-year refers to an autonomous recording unit deployed in a given year.
Audio data for a given ARU consists of approximately 500 zipped hour-long .flac files.
Note that a fast internet connection and sufficient data storage space is required given that ARU-years involve about 60 GB of audio data.
For more details regarding the bioacoustic monitoring program, please see:
Kelly, K. Wood, C., K. McGinn, A. Kramer, S. Sawyer, S. Whitmore, D. Reid, S. Kahl, A. Reiss, J. Eiseman, W. Berigan, J. Keane, P. Shaklee, L. Gallagher, T. Munton, H. Klinck, R.J. Gutierrez, M. Z. Peery. 2023. Estimating population size for California spotted owls and barred owls across the Sierra Nevada ecosystem with bioacoustics and demographic data. Ecological Indicators. 154:110851.
Once you sign up, it may take few days until the account gets activated. You will get notified by your email once your account is activated.