Terrestrial bioacoustics and noise

Terrestrial bioacoustics offers powerful, non-invasive tools to monitor biodiversity, behaviour, and ecosystem health across a wide range of taxa. Many terrestrial animals rely heavily on sound for communication, navigation, and predator avoidance, making acoustic signals particularly sensitive indicators of environmental change. Increasing levels of anthropogenic noise—from urban development, transport, and recreational activities—can mask biologically relevant sounds, alter calling behaviour, and ultimately affect fitness and population dynamics.
Passive acoustic monitoring enables long-term, continuous observations that complement traditional visual surveys. It is particularly valuable for cryptic, nocturnal or wide-ranging species, and allows analyses across temporal scales ranging from diel cycles to seasonal and interannual patterns. By combining acoustic data with environmental variables and measures of human activity, bioacoustics can help disentangle natural variability from disturbance-driven change.

Black cockatoo acoustics

Black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus sp., are endangered and specially protected in Western Australia. There is a regular citizen science survey, called the Great Cocky Count, which has provided crucial information on black cockatoo populations.

Cockatoos are noisy. They produce sounds that differ by species, age, gender and behaviour. We want to explore whether passive acoustic listening can provide additional data on population size, distribution and demographics. We are recording Carnaby’s cockatoos near the Curtin University Bentley campus, and red-tailed black cockatoos in John Forrest National Park.

We’re currently looking for students interested in analysing acoustic data and visual observations of black cockatoos, in order to establish a call repertoire of the above two species, to correlate calls with behaviour and demographic parameters, and to potentially look at changes in calling behaviour as a function of human disturbance.

Black cockatoo
Black cockatoo

Bat acoustics

Bats rely almost entirely on sound for navigation and foraging. Ultrasonic recordings can provide detailed information on species presence, activity patterns, and habitat use, particularly in urban–natural interfaces where visual monitoring is impractical. Bat acoustics also provide a sensitive measure of how artificial lighting and anthropogenic noise interact to influence nocturnal wildlife.

Frog acoustics

Frogs are widely recognised as bioindicators of environmental change. Their calling activity is tightly linked to breeding behaviour, hydrology and temperature, making them ideal for studying seasonal dynamics and climate sensitivity. Frog choruses can also serve as indicators of acoustic habitat quality and noise masking, particularly in peri-urban and managed landscapes.
We are exploring opportunities for partnerships with organisations specialising in frog monitoring, to combine existing survey expertise with passive acoustic approaches. Such collaborations would enable cross-taxa comparisons and methodological harmonisation across bird, bat and amphibian monitoring efforts.

Student projects and opportunities

We are actively seeking students interested in:
Projects can be tailored to students with backgrounds in ecology, biology, data science, signal processing, or environmental science, and can range from exploratory analyses to method development and applied conservation questions.

References Selected publications

Erbe C, Parsons M, Duncan AJ, Osterrieder S, Allen K (2017) Aerial and underwater sound of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV, drones). Journal of Unmanned Vehicle Systems 5 (3):92-101. https://doi.org/10.1139/juvs-2016-0018

Kuehne LM, Erbe C, Ashe E, Bogaard LT, Collins MS, Williams R (2020) Above and below: Military aircraft noise in air and under water at Whidbey Island, Washington. J Mar Sci Eng 8 (11):923. https://doi.org/10.3390/jmse8110923

Cooper CE, Erbe C, Withers PC, Barker JM, Ball N, Todd-Jones L (2023) Sound production by the short-beaked echidna (Tachyglossus aculeatus). Journal of Zoology 321 (4):302-308. https://doi.org/10.1111/jzo.13114

Madhusudhana S, Klinck H, Symes LB (2024) Extensive data engineering to the rescue: building a multi-species katydid detector from unbalanced, atypical training datasets. Philos Trans R Soc B 379 (1904):20230444. https://doi.org/doi:10.1098/rstb.2023.0444

Owens AF, Hockings KJ, Imron MA, Madhusudhana S, Mariaty, Setia TM, Sharma M, Maimunah S, Van Veen FJF, Erb WM (2024) Automated detection of Bornean white-bearded gibbon (Hylobates albibarbis) vocalizations using an open-source framework for deep learning. J Acoust Soc Am 156 (3):1623-1632. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0028268

Symes LB, Madhusudhana S, Martinson SJ, Geipel I, ter Hofstede HM (2024) Multi-year soundscape recordings and automated call detection reveals varied impact of moonlight on calling activity of neotropical forest katydids. Philos Trans R Soc B 379 (1904):20230110. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2023.0110

Erb WM, Ross W, Kazanecki H, Mitra Setia T, Madhusudhana S, Clink DJ. 2024. Vocal complexity in the long calls of Bornean orangutans. PeerJ 12:e17320 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.17320

Evora AJ, Cocroft RB, Madhusudhana S, Hamel JA (2024) VibePy: An open-source tool for conducting high-fidelity vibrational playback experiments. Entomologia Experimentalis et Applicata 172 (12):1176-1183. https://doi.org/10.1111/eea.13500

Haley SM, Madhusudhana S, and Branch CL (2024) Comparing detection accuracy of mountain chickadee (Poecile gambeli) song by two deep-learning algorithms. Front. Bird Sci. 3:1425463. https://doi.org/10.3389/fbirs.2024.1425463

Gurevich B, Isaenkov R, Erbe C, Gavrilov AN, Sidenko E, Tertyshnikov K, Vorobev M, Pevzner R (2025) Detection of aircraft noise using distributed acoustic sensing with a buried telecommunication cable. npj Acoustics 1 (1):2. https://doi.org/10.1038/s44384-025-00007-8