Bioregional-scale acoustic monitoring provides policy-ready information to support restoration of fire-prone forests

Resilience-focused forest restoration is necessary to prevent fire-driven regime shifts in many forests globally. However, restoration planning is challenged by limited resources to monitor biodiversity responses to management intervention, as well as to the disturbances they seek to prevent. 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 managers. We demonstrate these methods by mapping the occurrence of ten avian indicator species; examining the impact of fire history on patterns of occurrence across 25,000 km2 of the Sierra Nevada, California, USA. Monitoring complementary indicator species with rapidly-developing bioacoustics technology and relating their occurrence to policy-ready habitat metrics has 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. 

This dataset includes: 

Brunketal2023_PolicyReadyInfo_Code.R - Code to reproduce analyses in the manuscript

modelingData.zip - Data to reproduce occurrence models

predictionShapefiles.zip - Shapefiles of species occurrence predictions (model output)