ARU audio recordings with ruffed grouse annotations (Pennsylvania, 2020)

The following text comes from the manuscript under review in Wildlife Society Bulletin (Lapp et al. 2022) Our study area consisted of three State Game Lands managed by the Pennsylvania Game Commission (PGC) in north central Pennsylvania (see Parker et al. 2020 for a detailed description of study area). Each State Game Land (State Game Lands 033, 060, and 100) was dominated by forest (88-94%), comprised of mostly dry-oak (Quercus spp.) heath, dry-oak mixed-hardwood, and red maple (Acer rubrum) cover types. Elevations for the study sites ranged from 530 to 762 meters. We assessed ruffed grouse drumming in ten regenerating stands where overstory removal timber harvests occurred between 2009 and 2012 (meaning that 8 to 11 years had elapsed since harvest at the time of our pilot study). We deployed 60 AudioMoth acoustic recorders within the ten regenerating timber harvests selected for our case study. Survey locations were spaced at least 200 meters apart. AudioMoths were programmed to record audio at a 32 kHz sampling rate for three 30-minute periods each morning and recorded for four weeks during peak ruffed grouse courtship, from 19 April to 16 May 2020. Four devices malfunctioned or were lost during the deployment (e.g., water or black bear [Ursus americanus] damage), resulting in 56 locations with audio recordings distributed across the three State Game Lands. We performed 5-minute acoustic drumming surveys on four dates at each location by listening to the audio recorded by ARUs at each location and annotating all drumming events using Raven Pro software. The four ARU-based human point count dates were spaced across the ruffed grouse monitoring season (25 April, 1 May, 7 May, and 16 May) and contained audio from 07:40-07:45 Eastern Daylight Time. All annotations of ruffed grouse drumming were cross-evaluated by a second reviewer for accuracy. This effort resulted in a total of 224 annotated 5-minute audio clips. Lapp, S., Larkin, J., Parker, H., Larkin, J., Shaffer, D., Tett, C., McNeil, D., Fiss, C., Kitzes, J., In Review. "Automated recognition of Ruffed Grouse drumming in field recordings". Wildlife Society Bulletin. Parker, H. A., J. T. Larkin, D. Heggenstaller, J. Duchamp, M. C. Tyree, C. S. Rushing, E. Just Domoto, and J. L. Larkin. 2020. Evaluating the impacts of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) browsing on vegetation in fenced and unfenced timber harvests. Forest Ecology and Management 473:118326.