Bioregional-scale acoustic monitoring can support fire-prone forest restoration planning

Abstract

In many forests globally, resilience-focused restoration is necessary to prevent fire-driven regime shifts. However, restoration planning is challenged by limited resources for monitoring biodiversity responses to management intervention and to natural disturbances. Bioregional-scale passive acoustic monitoring, when combined with automated species identification tools and management-relevant habitat data, can be a tractable method to simultaneously monitor suites of complementary indicator species and rapidly generate species-specific information for resource managers. We demonstrate these methods by mapping the occurrence of ten avian indicator species while examining the impact of fire history on patterns of occurrence across 25,000 km2 of California's Sierra Nevada mountains. Monitoring complementary indicator species with rapidly developing bioacoustics technology and relating their occurrence to policy-ready habitat metrics have the potential to transform restoration planning by providing managers with high-resolution, ecosystem-scale information that facilitates adaptive management in an era of rapid environmental change.