Course: Making the Most of Bird Sounds

Bioacoustic monitoring is becoming an indispensable tool for bird surveyors, ecologists, and conservation professionals—but how do you ensure you’re using it to its full potential? This webinar will guide you through best practices for planning, running, and analysing bird surveys with bioacoustics, with a focus on high standards and practical application.

Through a mix of taught content and a live demo, we’ll explore each stage of the process:

• Deciding a Survey Focus – Clarifying whether your goal is short- or long-term monitoring, understanding species presence and behaviour, or tracking changes in assemblages over time.
• Planning the Physical Monitoring – Balancing site conditions, budget, and available human resources to design an effective field strategy.
• Planning the Analysis (Part 1) – Choosing the right analysis provider: what species do they cover, what methodologies do they use, and are their approaches peer-reviewed?
• Planning the Analysis (Part 2) – Validating and interpreting your data: setting up robust protocols to ensure confidence and reliability.
• Reporting Your Data – Best practices for representing, sharing, and applying your findings to maximise impact.
• Long-Term Considerations – Designing a survey programme that allows for future re-surveys, reprocessing of historical data, and secure, consistent data storage.

This session is ideal for ecologists, ornithologists, conservation practitioners, and anyone looking to integrate bioacoustics into their monitoring toolkit with confidence and rigour.