CONCLUSIONS
Because point counts survey sites differently than ARUs, their dual
employment can identify situations where the performance of either
method is strong or weak. When site visitation costs are shared,
dual-method surveys are efficient and can markedly increase community
coverage. We therefore recommend that, where possible, observer point
counts be conducted when ARUs are deployed and when data are retrieved.
Additionally, if some ARU recordings and point counts are conducted in
tandem, point count data can be used to assess site-specific ARU
detection radii (Van Wilgenburg et al., 2017; Yip et al., 2017). This
would allow for better estimates of species densities from the audio
data and help identify ARU species detection gaps (Vold et al., 2017).
For occupancy studies, automated species detection software could then
be used on longer sections of audio to efficiently search for species
that have low ARU detection probabilities (Tegeler et al., 2012).
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We thank C. L. Mahon and W. Easton (Environment and Climate Change
Canada, ECCC) for generously loaning ARU units for the BC component of
this study in 2019. We thank A. Edworthy, C. Rivas, T. White, and N.
Froese for data collection and transcription. Fieldwork was supported
by: a Werner and Hesse Wildegard Research award and the GoGlobal program
at UBC to DRD, ECCC, a Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council
of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grant to KM, the Chilean Ministry of the
Environment, and Comisión Nacional de Investigación Científica y
Tecnológica (CONICYT, REDES150047 and FONDECYT de Inicio 11160932) to
TAA and JTI. We thank BC Parks, the Chilean Forestry Service (11/2009
IX, 13/2015 IX, RNMCH 892127/2018) and The Huilo Huilo Biological
Reserve for permission to collect data within public protected
areas. TAA was supported by a Postdoctoral scholarship from CONICYT
(74160073).
Data Accessibility. The datasets produced and analysed in this
study are available at the Canadian Federal Open Government Portal
[https://open.canada.ca/en/open-data; data DOI: to be assigned
when deposited ]