Voices of the Night: Citizen Scientists Support Powerful Owl Conservation with Ecoacoustics

The intersection of cutting-edge technology and community-led conservation took centre stage on 21 March 2026 at the Ecoacoustics and Powerful Owl Workshop. Hosted at The University of Queensland, St Lucia, by the ARDC, BirdLife Australia, and Open Ecoacoustics, the event shared practical tools developed by Open Ecoacoustics that enable researchers, conservation practitioners and citizen scientists to manage, share and analyse environmental sound data at scale. 

The workshop was a resounding success, drawing 91 in-person and 76 online attendees. So far, they have reviewed 14,623 audio clips. The workshop received overwhelmingly positive feedback from its diverse audience, with 134 researchers and dedicated citizen scientists registered to attend. 

Scientists and Citizen Scientists Join for Powerful Owl Monitoring and Conservation

The day’s schedule was packed with expert insights and hands-on demonstrations:

• The Citizen Science Revolution: Andrew Dinwoodie (BirdLife Australia) explored how hundreds of volunteers are transforming our understanding of owl ecology in southeast Queensland and the Greater Sydney area.
• The Art of Owl Detecting: Dr Nick Hamilton (University of Queensland) and Lucy Parker Paul (Ironside State School) shared intimate behaviours of urban owls, drawing from over 2,000 personal observations.
• Dr Christina Zdenek: Dr Christina Zdenek (BirdLife Australia) highlighted the mission of BirdLife’s Urban Birds Program and the SGAR Taskforce, providing a crucial update on the successful campaign to restrict second-generation rodenticides that threaten the survival of Powerful Owls.
• Kevin Jensen: 2025 Community Hero Award winner Kevin Jensen shared his inspiring seven-year journey as a citizen scientist in Greenbank, demonstrating how individual passion for tracking owls and gliders can mobilise an entire community toward ecological stewardship.
• Cutting-Edge Ecoacoustics: PhD candidate Callan Alexander (QUT) provided a deep dive into how AI and automated call recognition are replacing arduous manual analysis.
• Predictive Mapping: Dr Rob Clemens (ARDC) demonstrated how the marriage of citizen science and ecoacoustics is delivering massive improvements in predicting owl distributions.
• Enthusiastic Community Response: Attendees described the experience as a “perfect fit” for those deeply connected to the natural soundscape, with many expressing how the day’s practical focus made them feel ready to move from “curiosity to confident workflows”.
• Expert Validation: Senior researchers and partners highlighted that the workshop and its associated tools are “gamechangers” for solving long-standing data archiving and analysis issues, effectively bridging the gap between expert scientists and those just beginning their bioacoustic journey.

One attendee reflected, “The in-person event was informative, providing a good perspective of our Australian environment in relation to Powerful Owl habitats and breeding and to provide insight into the additional monitoring assistance required and technology support. All presenters were interesting and well-equipped to speak through experience and expertise.”

Watch the workshop recording – use the timestamps to navigate to the session you’re interested in.

Take Action: Is that a Powerful Owl? Help Verify Bird Calls!

The workshop didn’t just share knowledge; it built a community. So far, 59 new volunteers have signed up to help verify AI classifications on the Powerful Owl Call-Detective website, which is powered by Open Ecoacoustics, and they have reviewed 14,623 audio clips.

• Learn more about the project: Open Ecoacoustics, Ecosounds, A20, and the BirdLife Powerful Owl project
• Watch the event: A full recording of the workshop presentations is available for those who missed the live sessions.

A Call for Citizen Scientists to Contribute to Real-World Conservation Impact

The workshop featured the opportunity for citizen scientists to contribute directly to Powerful Owl monitoring and conservation by listening to AI-identified Powerful Owl calls and recording whether the AI got it right or wrong. This helps to train the AI-driven call-recogniser to improve its accuracy and speed up acoustic data analysis – a huge benefit for researchers.

Open Ecoacoustics is the ARDC-supported research infrastructure that has created this unique way for citizen scientists to support wildlife conservation.

In 2021, Open Ecoacoustics partnered with the ABC on the Hoot Detective project, which involved citizen scientists analysing tens of thousands of owl calls from all over Australia..

In the past year, the Open Ecoacoustics team has developed 2 new websites for citizen scientists to support the verification of AI-identified bird calls.  

Australasian Bittern

The first is to identify the calls of the threatened Australasian Bittern, a project that supports the Eavesdropping on Wetland Birds project led by Dr Liz Znidersic at Charles Sturt University. Citizen scientists are invited to help verify calls of the elusive Australasian Bittern, a threatened species that is difficult to find and identify due to their natural camouflage into wetland environments. Our next webinar will focus on the Australasian Bittern – subscribe to our newsletter to find out when it’s open for registrations. Or while you’re waiting, you can help verify over 18,000 Bittern calls now >

Powerful Owl

The second website is for the Powerful Owl Project, run by Birdlife Australia. BirdLife Australia works with citizen scientists across South-East Queensland and Greater Sydney to map, monitor and protect Australia’s largest owl in urban and peri-urban areas. The recordings are analysed to understand where Powerful Owls are living, so specific habitats and locations can be protected into the future. Be part of the Powerful Owl project > 

More websites to help identify birds from audio recordings are coming!

There are more websites in development thanks to the suite of modular, open-source web components developed by Open Ecoacoustics to scale up acoustic-powered wildlife research. 

The tools, such as audio players, spectrogram viewers, and annotation tools, streamline the creation of ecoacoustic web applications, enabling rapid development and consistent user experiences across platforms. Already in use within the Ecosounds and A2O platforms, these reusable components are promoting participatory research models, including the citizen science project 

The project is also working towards major enhancements, including facilitating data exchange with the Atlas of Living Australia and Ecocommons Australia to enable greater integration of biodiversity data, improving database search capabilities and mapping visualisations, and enabling seamless access for Australian researchers through the Australian Access Federation (AAF).

Learn more about Open Ecoacoustics.

Open Ecoacoustics is a co-investment partnership with the Australian Research Data Commons through the Planet Research Data Commons (DOI: 10.3565/ts8c-ee10). The ARDC is enabled by the Australian Government’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).