Acoustic monitoring — using microphones and AI analysis to detect animal vocalisations — is an increasingly powerful non-invasive tool for assessing wildlife welfare at population scale in environments where visual monitoring is impossible.
Acoustic welfare monitoring bridges the gap between individual welfare assessment and population-scale welfare understanding. The ability to detect welfare-relevant signals — stress vocalisations, alarm calls, or the absence of normal social communication — at landscape scale without physical intervention opens new possibilities for non-invasive welfare assessment. Applications range from farm monitoring that detects disease early, to marine welfare assessment of noise pollution impacts, to forest monitoring of wildlife stress responses to human disturbance.