Bird song has been a source of inspiration and joy to people for centuries, but it can also provide clues about bird community health and insights into the success (or failure) of habitat management for birds. Passive acoustic monitoring – using sound to study nature – is a rapidly-advancing technique that’s increasingly being used to monitor bird populations in many contexts. In California’s Sierra Nevada, researchers are using passive acoustic monitoring at unprecedented scales to improve habitat management for birds in the context of rapidly changing climate and fire regimes.

Kristin Brunk, PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Oslo, in Oslo, Norway, and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in Ithaca, NY. Kristin’s research lies at the intersection of conservation, quantitative ecology, and behavioral ecology, and the questions that most interest her are those with implications both for wildlife conservation and for ecological theory. Kristin is a field ecologist at heart, and in addition to working in the Sierra Nevada, Kristin has conducted fieldwork in a wide variety of landscapes including the old growth redwood forest in Big Basin Redwoods State Park, the ground-nesting seabird paradise of Johnston Atoll (a tiny, remote Pacific wildlife refuge), the swamps and marshes of the ACE basin in South Carolina, the volcanic shores of Isla Española in the Galapagos, and the mountain birch forests of Norway.