Edinburgh Napier University

  Long-duration recorders are commercially available for week-scale terrestrial sound monitoring, but expensive and large, thus difficult to disguise in colonies. We have an active collaboration with the Soundtags group at St Andrews who have co-developed a low-cost miniature sound recorder for underwater monitoring (see www.oceaninstruments.co.nz). With appropriate changes, this recorder could be advantageous for monitoring sea-bird colonies. We propose to work with St Andrews to modify this recorder by replacing the hydrophone with a waterproof microphone (along with appropriate circuit changes) and by adding a GPS logging capability. Two such recorders will be built for the proposed study.
Outcomes of this project:
1. A low-cost indigenous sound recorder design for monitoring seabird colonies
2. An evaluation of the utility of sound recorders to simultaneously record ambient noise
and bird presence/disturbance
3. An assessment of the frequency/intensity of anthropogenic disturbance at St Abbs