Bioacoustic monitoring using passive acoustic devices is providing new insights into wildlife welfare, behaviour and population status. Vocalisation patterns can indicate stress, reproductive state and ecosystem health.
Acoustic monitoring provides a welfare monitoring capability that was previously impossible: non-invasive, continuous recording of animal behaviour and population status at landscape scale. For wildlife welfare, this means detecting population changes that indicate welfare challenges (reduced breeding activity), identifying individual stress responses (altered call patterns near disturbance), and monitoring the soundscape quality that directly affects animal welfare and behaviour. Anthropogenic noise pollution that masks natural soundscape communications - from traffic, industrial noise, wind turbines - creates genuine welfare harm for animals whose social and reproductive behaviour depends on acoustic communication.