Five non-consecutive nights were selected from each of the twelve sites (January 8th, 17th, 21st, 26th, and February 2nd of 2024) across two reserves in an Australian Eucalyptus open-forest. Nights were selected based on manual inspections of the recording quality, aiming to minimize the effects of geophony (nights with calm weather conditions with minimum wind). From each night’s recording, a two-hour window was used for data extraction, starting one hour after sunset to minimize contributions from dusk-active species (some of which are also diurnally active) while targeting the onset of nocturnal Orthopteran activity (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, and locusts) during the reproductive (summer) season. Each two-hour window was segmented into 1-minute clips at 10-minute intervals, resulting in 12 1-minute clips per night, from which one 1-minute clip was randomly selected for analysis. With six sites per study area (and five nights per site), this resulted in 60 1-minute sample recordings (30 per study area), providing a comprehensive temporal and spatial coverage of the summer soundscape within the broader study region. Data quality was further improved by applying a band-pass filter to attenuate low-frequency energy (<300 Hz), reducing bias from anthropogenic noise (highway and railway). Sonotypes were manually annotated by listening to recordings and examining spectrograms within each 1-minute sample. Four taxon groups were identified: frogs, nocturnal birds, and mammals below 4,000 Hz (with only a bat sonotype annotated above 10,000 kHz); and Orthopterans (crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, and locusts) between 1,400 and 20,000 Hz (with the majority of these orthoptera calls between 3,500 to 10,000 Hz). A presence–absence sonotype matrix was compiled to assess richness (rows = site × night recordings; columns = sonotypes; 1 = detected, 0 = absent). All soundscapes present across the 60 1-minute samples were annotated and assigned to the four taxon groups (Orthopterans, birds, frogs, mammals) and to “other” (noise from anthropophony or geophony; presence– absence sonotype matrix in S1 Appendix).

Passive acoustic monitoring was conducted at twelve forest sites in southeast Queensland across two seasons (winter and summer) using BAR-LT recorders with omnidirectional microphones. Recorders captured nightly soundscapes over 30 consecutive days per season, from 7:00 PM to 3:00 AM. From these recordings, 210 one-minute audio files per season were randomly selected and manually analysed to identify distinct sonotypes through auditory inspection and spectrogram analysis. Five acoustic indices (ACI, AEI, BI, H, and SPL) were calculated to quantify soundscape variation. Statistical analyses included Mann–Whitney U tests for seasonal differences, Spearman’s rank correlations, and GLMMs with a negative binomial distribution to assess relationships between acoustic indices and sonotype richness. This dataset includes two folders, “summer” and “winter,” each containing the 210 one-minute files used for sonotype identification and index calculation, along with a CSV file of sonotype counts, the final dataset used in the analysis, and the R script used to run all analyses. Further details are provided in the accompanying README.txt file.

Five non-consecutive nights were selected from each of the twelve sites (January 8th, 17th, 21st, 26th, and February 2nd of 2024) across two reserves in Australian Eucalyptus open-forest. Nights were selected based on manual inspections of the recording quality, aiming to minimize the effects of geophony (nights with calm weather conditions with minimum wind). From each night’s recording, a two-hour window was used for data extraction starting one hour after sunset to minimize contributions from dusk-active species (some of which are also diurnally active) while targeting the onset of nocturnal Orthopteran activity (crickets, katydids, grasshoppers, and locusts) during the reproductive (summer) season. Each two-hour window was segmented into 1-minute clips at 10-minute intervals, resulting in 12 1-minute clips per night, from which one 1-minute clip was randomly selected for analysis. With six sites per study area (and five nights per site), this resulted in 60 1-minute sample recordings (30 per study area) providing a comprehensive temporal and spatial coverage of the summer soundscape within the broader study region. Data quality was further improved by applying a band-pass filter to attenuate low-frequency energy (<300 Hz), reducing bias from anthropogenic noise (highway and railway). Sonotypes were manually annotated by listening to recordings and examining spectrograms within each 1-minute sample. Four taxon groups were identified: frogs, nocturnal birds, and mammals below 4,000 Hz (with only a bat sonotype annotated above 10,000 kHz); and Orthopterans (crickets, grasshoppers, katydids, and locusts) between 1,400 and 20,000 Hz (with the majority of these orthoptera calls between 3,500 to 10,000 Hz). A presence–absence sonotype matrix was compiled to assess richness (rows = site × night recordings; columns = sonotypes; 1 = detected, 0 = absent). All soundscapes present across the 60 1-minute samples were annotated and assigned to the four taxon groups (Orthopterans, birds, frogs, mammals) and to “other” (noise from anthropophony or geophony; presence– absence sonotype matrix in S1 Appendix).

This project aims to develop bioacoustic methods of monitoring breeding in the south-eastern red-tailed black-cockatoo and the glossy black-cockatoo. Breeding success is a key limiting factor in population recovery for these threatened populations. Conservation managers want to target conservation actions to improve breeding outcomes, but currently have little evidence to guide them, due to a lack of monitoring data on breeding success, and how this relates to key habitat variables known to influence breeding (e.g. food supply). These species are difficult to monitor using traditional methods. For breeding to be feasibly monitored in the future, new methods that are accurate, efficient, and have smaller human resource requirements are needed. This project will develop novel bioacoustic methods to monitor breeding in these species. Specifically, our aims are to develop and test bioacoustic methods of monitoring breeding-related vocal behaviours at active nests of threatened black-cockatoos.