Audio and video monitoring @ European Conference of Tropical Ecology, Paris, March 2018

[Jérôme SUEUR <>]

Dear bioacousticians,

The Society for Tropical Ecology organises its annual meeting in 2018 in Paris, March 26-29:

http://www.soctropecol-conference.eu/

There will be a session dedicated to Audio and video monitoring you might find interest in (see the Abstract pasted below) .

Please do not hesitate to forward the information or to join us in Paris next spring!

Very best regards,

Jerome

Audio and video monitoring of tropical animal diversity: new insights and new challenges

Jérôme Sueur, Alice C. Hughes, Patrick A. Jansen

Monitoring animal diversity is a key challenge of tropical ecology, as getting reliable information on

species ecology in a standardised manner across space and time is challenging. Furthermore the

rarity of some species and challenging landscapes and ecosystems can make direct observations and

captures difficult. Yet understanding species distributions, their populations and their movements and

the communities or landscape they belong to is essential information to not only understand their

ecology bit also to ensure they are adequately protected into the future.

However, recent noninvasive techniques based on audio and video autonomous sensors open the

possibility to sample tropical environments over large areas and long time periods in a consistent and

reliable manner. Such digital data acquired remotely and automatically returns valuable information on

animal behaviour, animal distribution, animal community composition, and even landscape structure.

In this session, we will report the most recent finding in terms of audio and video monitoring and

discuss about the possible challenges in terms of data collection, sampling design, supervised and

unsupervised automatic identification of species, and ecological indices. We will also show that these

data can be used as an attractive media to raise public awareness about tropical diversity and

conservation. We will aim to conclude the session with a presentation of the integration of these

different types of techniques to obtain a holistic understanding of the potential of these technologies.