Acoustic approach as an alternative to human-based survey in bird biodiversity monitoring in agricultural meadows

RESEARCH ARTICLE Acoustic approach as an alternative to human-based survey in bird biodiversity monitoring in agricultural meadows Michał BudkaID1*, Marek Jobda2, Paweł Szałański2, Hubert Pio´ rkowski2 1 Faculty of Biology, Department of Behavioural Ecology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poznań, Poland, 2 Department of Nature Protection and Rural Landscape, Institute of Technology and Life Sciences, Falenty, Poland * m.budka@amu.edu.pl Abstract Acoustic monitoring has been tested as an alternative to the traditional, human-based approach of surveying birds, however studies examining the effectiveness of different acoustic methods sometimes yield inconsistent results. In this study we examined whether bird biodiversity estimated by traditional surveys of birds differs to that obtained through soundscape surveys in meadow habitats that are of special agricultural importance, and whether acoustic monitoring can deliver reliable indicators of meadows and farmland bird biodiversity. We recorded soundscape and simultaneously surveyed birds by highly skilled human-observers within a fixed (50 m and 100 m) and unlimited radius using the point-count method twice in the breeding season at 74 recording sites located in meadows, in order to compare differences in (1) bird biodiversity estimation of meadow, farmland, songbird, and all bird species and (2) the detection rate of single bird species by these two methods. We found that recorders detected more species in comparison to the human-observers who sur-

veyed birds within a fixed radius (50 and 100 m) and fewer when detection distance for human-observers was unlimited. We did not find significant differences in the number of meadow and farmland bird species detected by recorders and observers within a 100 m radius–the most often used fixed radius in traditional human based point-counts. We also showed how detection rate of 48 the most common bird species in our study differ between these two methods. Our study showed that an acoustic survey is equally effective as human observers surveying birds within a 100 m radius in estimation of farmland and meadow bird biodiversity. These groups of species are important for agricultural landscape and com- monly used as indicators of habitat quality and its changes. Even though recorders rarely detect species that remain mostly silent during the observation periods, or species that are further distant than 100 m away, we recommend using acoustic soundscape recording methods as an equally effective and more easily standardised alternative for monitoring of farmland and meadow bird biodiversity. We propose adaptation of acoustic approach to long-term, large-scale monitoring by collecting acoustic data by non-specialists, including landowners and volunteers, and analysing them in a standardised way by units supervising monitoring of agriculture landscape. PLOS ONE PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0266557 April 8, 2022 1 / 16 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 a1111111111 OPEN ACCESS Citation: Budka M, Jobda M, Szałański P,

Pio´rkowski H (2022) Acoustic approach as an alternative to human-based survey in bird biodiversity monitoring in agricultural meadows. PLoS ONE 17(4): e0266557. https://doi.org/ 10.1371/journal.pone.0266557 Editor: Richard Mankin, US Department of Agriculture, UNITED STATES Received: September 10, 2021 Accepted: March 22, 2022 Published: April 8, 2022 Copyright: © 2022 Budka et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Data Availability Statement: All relevant data are within the manuscript and its Supporting Information files. Funding: The authors received no specific funding for this work. Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.