When a team of conservation biologists was tasked with surveying for Barred Owl and California Spotted Owls throughout the northern Sierra Nevada, “the prospect was overwhelming,” says team member Connor Wood. “We looked at the logistics and realized there’s no way we can do this with traditional methods.” So the team devised a system for “passive acoustic monitoring,” planting 200 audio recording devices across thousands of square miles of mountainous terrain to collect owl calls for two years.
