Wilder Sensing joins Ecosulis and the Knepp Wildland Foundation to facilitate the restoration of the River Adur in Sussex
We are really pleased that ecological consultancy Ecosulis, who specialise in the delivery of landscape-scale habitat restoration solutions, has asked Wilder Sensing to contribute to the River Adur Recovery project in Sussex. Ecosulis has been commissioned by the Knepp Wildland Foundation to manage the two-year assignment where they will monitor and evaluate the biodiversity that currently exists with the aim of restoring and enhancing the Adur River and its surrounding habitats. As part of this we have been deployed to monitor the bird species from bioacoustics data along the river corridor.
The success of the project will be down to collaboration. The Adur stretches 20 miles across farmed landscape and highly populated areas, so it was crucial to get as many landowners and farmers on board. To date stakeholders in the project, include 30 farmers, land managers and support from the Ouse and Adur Rivers Trust, Sussex Wildlife Trust, Adur District Council and Horsham District Council.
Over the years the river’s banks have been built up for farming and in turn this led to a deterioration of natural flood management. The Knepp Wildland Foundation want to create a connected corridor of riparian life which will not only enhance water quality, boost biodiversity, reduce drought and restore flood plains but also develop eco system service benefits for humans such as natural flood management, carbon sequestration and pollination for crops. These positive developments will enhance climate resilience along the Adur.
Although bioacoustics surveys were not initially listed as a requirement for the project Ecosulis identified an opportunity to enhance both data quality and engagement by including them. Their low cost, robust auditability, and ability to provide meaningful insights made them a valuable addition.
“We had done some bioacoustics monitoring before to gauge the diversity of the overall soundscape using acoustic indices, so we suggested incorporating bioacoustics to Knepp. They were very on board. People love bioacoustics – it is very engaging for different communities, and you get a lot of data which is high quality and repeatable.” said Ella Milne, Ecosystem Analyst at Ecosulis.
Six recorders have been placed strategically along the River Adur capturing sound 24/7 which will provide hundreds and thousands of bioacoustics records during the pilot.
We worked strategically with Ecosulis to ensure we were able to deliver against the client’s requirements, balancing project needs, time, and budget. So, we split the river into six key areas with a detector in each and a survey every 2-3 weeks giving us a snapshot for each season.
The data from the monitors will be gathered by the Ecosulis team and then uploaded to the Wilder Sensing platform where it is processed using AI and results are provided direct to Ecosulis. Using our platform the Ecosulis team can use the drop-down filters to see different species or use a pie chart to get proportions of species. It provides the opportunity to look at the different compositions of bird communities, the frequency of calls across the day or see how this changes across the month and can reveal whether land management interventions affect these communities.
With the Wilder Sensing platform you get so much data, more than you would with an ecologist going out to site 3 times a year – there are hundreds of thousands of records providing crucial insights making it easy to visualise real-time what is happening.” said Milne. “Stakeholders particularly love bioacoustics reports. The common Nightingale has a strong population at Knepp but by using these machine learning algorithms we have picked them up on other sites along the river Adur too. We were surprised at the levels of species richness throughout the sites showing the impact of the work Knepp has done.” said Milne.
We will keep you updated on the bioacoustics on the river Adur as this exciting project progresses.
