TABMON: design and deployment of a transnational passive acoustic monitoring network for European birds

Benjamin Cretois, Carolyn Rosten, Julia Wiel, Cynthia Barile, Ben McEwen, Corentin Bernard, Michiel P Boom, Gerard Bota, Lluís Brotons, Eva Serrano Davies, Hervé Glotin, W. Daniel Kissling, Ricard Marxer, Cristian Pérez-Granados, Dan Stowell, Dani Villero, Jelle S van Zweden, Sarab Sethi

1.    Ecological surveys are often fragmented, costly, and limited in scale, leading to large and long-standing knowledge gaps which threaten our ability to properly safeguard biodiversity.

2.    Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) has promised to deliver automated biodiversity monitoring, but networks are rarely deployed on scales that can offer truly novel insights due to scalability and standardisation challenges around collecting, managing, analysing, and sharing data.

3.    Here we present the Transnational Acoustic Biodiversity Monitoring Network (TABMON), a standardised deployment of 108 autonomous sensors across Norway, Netherlands, France and Spain along a continental bird migration route. Audio is recorded continuously, uploaded in near real-time, and processed through an automated analysis pipeline designed to support expert validation and the generation of datasets for deriving Essential Biodiversity Variables (EBVs). 

4.    TABMON provides a methodological blueprint for transnational, networked PAM deployments and highlights both the opportunities and current limitations of near-real-time acoustic biodiversity monitoring at continental scales.