Collaborative Projects

Savannah restoration in Kenya

With community-run conservancies and the NGO Natural State, I am co-developing a scalable biodiversity assessment program to support the evaluation of several broad-scale restoration efforts. Natural State works with local partners, like the Lewa Wildlife Conservancy, to connect quantifiable outcomes of i) carbon sequestration, ii) biodiversity conservation, and iii) human well-being to financial markets to provide funding for sustainable management of social-ecological systems.

Accessing novel conservation finance mechanisms, notably conservation bonds, requires rigorous outcome assessment structures, ideally with transferable metrics like population growth of a target species. For this reason, our early stage work is focusing on relatively controllable contexts, like assessing the effects of elephant exclosure fencing on bird diversity and carbon sequestration via tree regrowth.

Tapir Valley tree frog

The Tapir Valley tree frog is a microendmic species known only at a single wetland in Costa Rica. It is classified as Critically Endangered by the IUCN. University of Georgia & Yang Center graduate student Valeria Aspinall is designing a bioacoustic survey protocol to inform a long-term monitoring program for this species, as well as accelerate efforts to locate additional breeding areas.

Grassland birds and solar development

Grassland birds have declined substantially across the northeastern United States over the last century as the ratio of agricultural land to forest cover has shifted toward the latter. In New York, non-forested lands are prioritized for solar energy development, thus creating possible tension between conservation of declining habitat specialists and the clear need for renewable energy. Dr. Steve Grodsky, Assistant Unit Leader at the New York Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Unit (based at Cornell University) is exploring how these tradeoffs may effect a suite of grassland birds across New York; we are supporting his group’s application of passive acoustic surveys and machine learning tools to the resulting audio.

Orange-bellied Parrot conservation

The Orange-bellied Parrot is Australia’s most threatened bird: in 2016 just three females and 11 males remained in the wild. We are working with Difficult Bird Group to develop scalable bioacoustic tools to survey potential breeding grounds in the salt marshes of northern Tasmania.

Rangeland management in Namibia

We are working with Dr. Frowin Becker of the Ongava Research Centre in northern Nambia, where the reserve, the abutting Etosha National Park, and freehold farms form a complex matrix of habitats with contrasting management regimes. The current priority is identifying avian indicator species and relating their occurrence to relevant environmental factors and establishing a long-term, scalable monitoring program.

Owls of the Atlantic Forest

The Atlantic Forest is a global biodiversity hotspot with high rates of endemism even compared to other hotspots. The last large tract of intact forest is in the Misiones province of Argentina, and where graduate student Agostina Juncosa Polzella has conducted passive acoustic surveys and developed custom classifiers to identify resident owls. We are assessing the implications of plausible landuse change scenarios for native species.