Acoustic surveys on private property in north-east NSW

The acoustic surveys were designed to collect male koala bellows on private native forest. To date there have been very few formal studies looking at koala occupancy in private native forest. The surveys were carried out during the breeding season, spanning spring into early summer. With repeat surveys over consecutive nights to account for imperfect detection in an occupancy modelling framework.

Data was collected using AudioMoth acoustic recorders. The raw WAV files were processed using koala recognisers Ecoacoustics Audio Analysis (version 2). Recordings matched by the koala recogniser were validated by manually visualising spectrograms of the audio and listening to recordings to check for false positives. The data was manipulated into an Occupancy format for analyses.

These acoustic data were collected by the landholder on private property. Landholders signed an agreement which prevents DPIRD publishing location data for the survey sites. Records of species (koalas) are published to BioNet at the landholder's discretion - as per the legal agreement. Data published is presence/absence data for the survey period at each site. For more info see: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.14099