DivMoSt Biodiversity monitoring of meadow orchards: Development of methods for monitoring bird species using audio devices

With the intensification of agriculture, the availability of extensively used areas has decreased significantly. Orchard meadows are one of these habitats, which are of particular importance for many animal and plant species due to their heterogeneous and semi-open structure. Although orchards are supported by agri-environmental measures, they are currently not economically competitive and are therefore in sharp decline - among other things, important nesting and feeding habitats are being lost. Within the project, data for selected indicator animal groups (wild bees, butterflies, birds, bats) will be collected. An interdisciplinary analysis of biodiversity data with remote sensing and orchard data should improve the picture of the status and development of biodiversity in cultivated land. In addition, the detection of bird species based purely on vocalizations, which can be provided using audio recorders, is compared with data directly collected in the orchards by field workers. This enables an assessment of the extent to which the acoustic recording devices can be used to record species diversity or specific indicator species in orchards. Ideally, additionally installed audio devices can be used on a large scale in the future and provide an insight with respect to changes in species composition or population sizes of indicator species in Austria across the surveyed areas.