23/04/2026
🎧🌍 Listening to Europe’s Birds – the advances in acoustic monitoring
Acoustic monitoring, especially the employment of Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) – the use of autonomous recording units to collect data on sound - has seen tremendous progress in the last 15 years and could potentially transform bird monitoring.
As with any new technology, it brings exciting new opportunities but also a range of challenges to be addressed in bird monitoring.
🔹 Introducing AMOG
As a first step, the EBCC recognised the growing use of acoustic monitoring across Europe and established the Acoustic Monitoring Group (AMOG) to address these developments and encourage knowledge exchange among its partner organisations. AMOG aims to coordinate, align, and integrate acoustic bird monitoring across Europe to strengthen overall bird monitoring efforts.
🔹 What do countries think?
We further distributed a questionnaire across European partnerships and received responses from 32 countries, indicating strong interest in acoustic monitoring—most respondents saw added value as a complementary tool for atlases and inventory surveys, for presence/absence data on species in remote areas, and especially for nocturnal, rare or hard-to-detect species. At the same time, respondents highlighted key challenges: increasing data-processing capacity, caution and limitations in using the technology in bird-monitoring schemes, and the potential loss of the link between the work and the fieldworker community.
🤝Individual case studies
Over the next few weeks, we will present individual case studies on acoustic monitoring and its use in Europe. Hopefully, through collaboration and shared learning, we can develop the best standardisation process to unlock the full potential of this technology.
Read more on AMOG:https://www.ebcc.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/sattler-and-roodbergen-introducing-amog.pdf
Read more on the questionnaire:https://www.ebcc.info/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/vorisek-and-kornienko.pdf
