The goals of this project are to process and analyze audio recordings of songbirds in eastern national park service (NPS) parks implemented as a supplement to northeast temperate inventory and…

The goals of this project are to process and analyze audio recordings of songbirds in eastern national park service (NPS) parks implemented as a supplement to northeast temperate inventory and monitoring network (netns) volunteer-based long-term bird monitoring program to enhance our knowledge about the diversity of birds in NPS parks. The purpose of this award is to develop and improve methods for processing and analyzing sound recordings of forest birds collected as a supplement to netns landbird monitoring program to improve our understanding of forest bird diversity and the factors that affect their occurrence in netn parks. The project will hire a postdoctoral research associate to develop and improve methods for processing and analyzing sound recordings of forest birds. The post DOC will coordinate annotating sound files and conduct analyses to improve the classification of forest birds using artificial intelligence models (e.g., birdnet) in support of netns long-term monitoring forest bird data, which is implemented to improve our understanding of bird diversity in netns parks over time. Audio recordings that have been collected at specified netn long term monitoring sites for the past three years will be processed and analyzed for forest birds. Periodic meetings will be completed to assess and review analysis outcomes and publications describing the results of the main project goals including summary tables and figures from the analyses. The outcomes of this work will increase the public and scientific communitys knowledge of how automated recorders can be used to improve bird community monitoring with the ultimate goal of understanding how bird communities within eastern forests relate to the overall forest health in these parks. This project will build resource stewardship ethics in its participants including the greater public and youth by providing opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students to learn about the nations resources by spending time working on projects in national parks.