During April/May 2024, consistent with SERF’s other monitoring programs, and the need to track progress scientifically on this project, I decided to initially establish 1-2 trail cameras on site – as phenocams (vegetation change cameras) – and acoustic monitoring.
Acoustic Monitoring I determined in consultation with Dr. David Tucker that initially 1 Solar powered BioAcoustic Recorder (Solar BAR) should be deployed near the bottom of the passive plot where it meets the active plot – to record continuous audio data for later analysis – given these devices’ detection radii is quite wide on open pasture (>100m):
Image of the site showing fungal transects, the position of the acoustic recorder and proposed future artwork sites (Image Keith Armstrong)
The choice of this hardware is consistent with the equipment used by the Australian Acoustic Observatory which Dr. David Tucker is a member of – ensuring he will be able to help identify the call sounds.
Acoustic Spectrogram of Bird Sound (Image courtesy of Frontier Labs)
SolarBAR recorder + Dr. David Tucker and Prof Paul Roe (Australian Acoustic Observatory)
The initial acoustic monitor was installed on June 11th 2024.
Dr. David Tucker installing the acoustic monitor settings, June 11, 2024 (Image Keith Armstrong)
Visual Monitoring
Phenocams are digital cameras (usually trail cams more typically used to capture nocturnal animal movements) set up to capture photo time-lapse images of foliage (ranging from one per 30 mins to one per day) at the same times. Scientists use these continuous visual records to observe things like vegetation development, including flowering, fruiting, and leaf lifecycles. I this way they are able to generate quantitative measures of plant phenology (timings of cyclical or seasonal biological events, that might include flowering, migrations, egg laying or hibernation).
4.0cg Sy electronic Technical co ltd Trail Cam with 4G – one of the various cameras I have to hand
Aerial Monitoring This would be a mixture of input from the QUT REF team who fly 35mm quality cameras – and my own Mavic 2 Zooms. Initial photos were taken on 24/4/24 showing some of the area put aside for the artwork.
A part of the artwork site, April 2024 (Image Keith Armstrong)
