Analysis of acoustic index against temperature and barometric pressure

1. New low-cost options to long-term acoustic monitoring in terrestrial
ecology are becoming increasingly available. However, integration of
acoustic stations with sensors for logging of additional data, such as
temperature and barometric pressure is rare. Separate environmental
loggers often come at a cost of > US$100 whereas the same sensors
for use with microprocessors come at a cost between US$. 1-15 The cost
savings integration entails as well as the crucial need for the recording
of some of these variables in acoustic studies mean that this is an
important development avenue. 2. Overcoming these issues is important to
enable insights into the long-term dynamics of ecological systems and how
they respond to changes in the environment at varying temporal scales and
is especially important for studies involving species that are
microclimate dependent. 3. Here we present a hardware system for both
acoustic and environmental data logging where the board design is released
under a creative commons license. The system has been field tested in a
tropical setting and is called the Kinabalu Recorder. The presented
configuration came at a cost of less than US$100 per station. This cost is
for professional manufacture and assembly of the boards, temperature and
barometric sensor, two batteries, water-proof housing and two 64 GB micro
SD cards. 4. The system has been extensively tested in a tropical setting
along an altitude gradient and with over 1.3 TB of data (> 2,000
hours of data with over 10 months in the field) presents a robust solution
to long term acoustic monitoring integrated with environmental data
sensors. 5. Work on hardware and software systems are an important part of
the technological development of field biology as it allows greater
flexibility in terms of cost and configuration of systems whilst promoting
cross-field collaboration and information flow.