This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Northern spotted owl populations are approaching or have already crossed functional extinction across large areas of the Pacific Northwest, a new study, published in Ecological Applications found. Researchers used artificial intelligence and advanced monitoring methods to assess long-term trends at an unprecedented scale.
While northern spotted owl populations have declined for decades, this study identifies where populations are at or near functional extinction, meaning numbers are so low that they no longer play a meaningful ecological role or cannot reproduce enough to persist. It also provides detailed population data on barred owls, which outcompete northern spotted owls for prey and habitat. "These findings demonstrate that passive acoustic monitoring and machine learning can be used for large-scale ecological monitoring," said Damon Lesmeister, a wildlife biologist at the U.S.
Forest Service's Pacific Northwest Research Station and a courtesy faculty member at Oregon State University. "Our hope is that they can help shape conservation strategies and improve conservation outcomes for the northern spotted owl." The conservation and management of northern spotted owls became one of the largest and most visible wildlife conservation issues in U.S. history after the species was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 because of rapid declines in the owl's old-forest habitats. Four years later, the Northwest Forest Plan was adopted and reduced the rate of logging of old-growth forests on federal lands.
Despite more than 30 years of protection, northern spotted owl populations have continued to decline due to continued habitat loss from logging and wildfire and competition from barred owls, whose range in recent decades has increasingly intersected with spotted owl territory. For the new study, scientists led by teams at the U.S. Forest Service and Oregon State's Department of Fisheries, Wildlife, and Conservation Sciences divided more than 38,000 square miles (98,000 square kilometers) of federally managed northern spotted owl habitat in Oregon, Washington and northwestern California into 5-kilometer (3.1-mile) hexagon sampling units meant to replicate the typical territory of a northern spotted owl.
They randomly selected 1,027, or 3%, of those hexagons and deployed four passive acoustic recording devices in each hexagon for a six- to eight-week period between February and September 2023. The devices collected more than 2.1 million hours of recordings. Using machine learning models the researchers developed, research computers at Oregon State's Center for Quantitative Life Sciences analyzed those recordings.
Among the findings from that analysis: Discover the latest in science, tech, and space with over 100,000 subscribers who rely on Phys.org for daily insights. d research that matter—daily or weekly. This monitoring has continued since the 2023 period analyzed in this paper, and preliminary findings from the additional monitoring mirror those outlined in the paper, Lesmeister said. Lesmeister believes the findings can help focus northern spotted owl conservation strategies on specific geographic areas.
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