Can you hear an Australasian Bittern?
The Australasian Bittern is a threatened species that are difficult to find and identify due to their natural camouflage into wetland environments. Our mission is to track and identify the Australasian Bittern’s distinct calls through novel ecoacoustic research.
Research Objectives
By helping identify Bittern calls, you're contributing to a growing library of acoustic data that:
- Better understand the distribution of little-known wetland bird species in south-eastern Australia
- Improve artificial intelligence training datasets
- Determining the presence or absence of bird species
- Contributes to research projects trialing the large-scale deployment of acoustic sensors with manual data collection
Meet the Team
Dr Elizabeth (Liz) Znidersic
Dr Elizabeth (Liz) Znidersic is a post-doctoral researcher with Charles Sturt University. Her major research interests include survey methodologies and the application of technological tools to monitor individual species and ecosystems, wetland species and their management and island biodiversity and species reintroductions/translocations. Liz’s research has led her into the wetlands of Australia and the USA, searching for some the most secretive wetland birds using acoustic and motion-activated camera monitoring. She has worked extensively in the field as a ranger, field ecologist and environmental educator with nature-based tourism.
Dr Michael Towsey
Dr Michael Towsey uses machine learning methods to solve biological problems. These have ranged from the sublime (analysis of bird song) to the ridiculous (analysis of milk yield in cow herds) with some bioinformatics in between! Michael works on the ‘big data’ problems associated with long duration recordings of the environment, in particular, building recognizers for species of interest, extracting acoustic indices to aid navigation and visualisation. He is currently submerged in the sounds of wetlands.
Professor David Watson
Professor David M Watson’s research falls into three principal areas: managing biodiversity in agricultural landscapes; measuring and predicting the biological effects of habitat fragmentation; and the ecology of parasitic plants. His research has been conducted through detailed community-level field studies in Australia and Latin America; species-specific studies of distribution and abundance; theoretical advances; empirical studies based on previously published data; & synthetic reviews consolidating existing information and proposing new hypotheses.