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A new report from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) highlights the need for better nature monitoring at the local level, not just national indicators. The UK already has strong national biodiversity datasets that show long term trends in species and habitats. These are essential for policy and reporting. But they can be slow to change and often lack the local detail needed for quick, practical decisions. The JNCC report, Signals from local and national monitoring

Innovation is often most effective when it is shaped by the people who will use and benefit from it. Innovate UK Adopt projects focus on supporting the adoption of new approaches by funding farmers and other stakeholders to explore how innovations can be applied in practical, real-world settings. By giving farmers the platform to identify challenges, test solutions, and provide feedback to new technology providers, the projects help ensure that innovations are developed with

A research team at James Cook University has shown how existing AI sound-recognition tools can be repurposed to monitor mammals at scale, not just birds and insects. In a study published in Methods in Ecology and Evolution, researchers analysed more than 300,000 hours of wildlife audio collected across eastern Australia. Their goal was to test whether passive acoustic monitoring, already widely used for birds, could also work for vocal mammals such as koalas and other native

A new review published in Trends in Ecology and Evolution introduces an intriguing idea: we can measure soil health by listening to it. The research team, led by scientists at Flinders University, considers the novel field of soil ecoacoustics. Typically soil health is tracked by digging up soil samples and sending them to a lab. With ecoacoustics, researchers place sensors in the ground and record tiny sounds and vibrations produced by soil life and natural processes. Think

A recent article in Nature explores how digital agriculture technologies such as drones, smart cameras, soil DNA testing, and acoustic sensors can double as tools for biodiversity monitoring. The researchers suggest that with minimal additional effort conventional farm data could also help track species presence, soil life, and ecosystem health. The potential benefits are significant. Farms could become “living monitoring sites,” generating continuous, high-resolution biodive

Let’s start with the bad news. Across the UK, nature is under threat. Farmland birds have declined dramatically over the last few decades, pollinators are struggling, and many familiar species are becoming harder to spot year after year. According to national statistics, the UK has seen a 13% decline in species abundance since 1970. In a measure of how intact a country’s nature and biodiversity is, the UK ranked 189th out of 240 countries and territories. But there is also re

Crop Innovations is proud to be collaborating with AgriSound and Baker Consultants to develop a new automatic biodiversity monitoring capability. Passive acoustic monitoring is a useful tool for tracking general biodiversity metrics. For example, in the graph below, the acoustic complexity index is a good indicator of bird song, showing peaks at dawn and dusk. The Agrisound Soundscape Monitor will be the first fully autonomous system, generating biodiversity indicator metrics