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Bioacoustics and AI help scientists listen in on elusive Australian cockatoos

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Barely a year after the Australian government classified the eastern pink cockatoo as an endangered subspecies, scientists have deployed technology to help study and protect the birds. With the help of passive acoustic monitoring and artificial intelligence, researchers at the Queensland University of Technology found their way to a previously unknown breeding hollow of eastern pink cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri) at the Bowra Wildlife Sanctuary in Queensland state, northeastern Australia. “We had known that they were foraging there, but we didn’t know that they were breeding in that area,” Lola Lange, who was involved in the research and is pursuing her master’s degree in biology and environmental science at QUT, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We now know that it is even more important to protect the sanctuary.” Pink cockatoos, with eastern and western subspecies, are endemic to Australia. However, the birds are hard to monitor and study because they live in remote arid and semiarid ecosystems. Despite their declining population, the difficulty and high costs associated with monitoring the birds have meant that there’s been very little research and academic literature that maps their habitats and studies their behavior. “In Queensland, we really don’t know why their populations are declining, what trees they like, what food they like and where they nest,” Lange said. While figuring out how to track eastern pink cockatoos, passive acoustic monitoring was the most obvious choice to Lange and her teammates. The method of leaving audio recorders that can gather vast amounts of…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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