The Kinabalu Recorder, a new passive acoustic and environmental monitoring recorder

Abstract

New low-cost options to long-term acoustic monitoring in terrestrial ecology are becoming increasingly available. However, integration of acoustic stations with sensors for logging of additional data, such as temperature and barometric pressure is rare. Separate environmental loggers often come at a cost of >US$100 whereas the same sensors for use with microprocessors come at a cost between US$ 1–15. The cost savings integration entails as well as the crucial need for the recording of some of these variables in acoustic studies mean that this is an important development avenue. Overcoming these issues is important to enable insights into the long-term dynamics of ecological systems and how they respond to changes in the environment at varying temporal scales and is especially important for studies involving species that are heavily influenced by microclimate. Here we present a hardware system for both acoustic and environmental data logging where the board design is released under a creative commons license. The system has been field tested in a tropical setting and is called the Kinabalu Recorder. The presented configuration came at a cost of <US$100 per station. This cost is for professional manufacture and assembly of the boards, temperature and barometric sensor, two batteries, waterproof housing and two 64 GB micro SD cards. The system has been extensively tested in a tropical setting along an altitude gradient and with over 1.3 TB of data (>2,000 hr of data with over 10 months in the field) presents a robust solution to long-term acoustic monitoring integrated with environmental data sensors. Work on hardware and software systems is an important part of the technological development of field biology as it allows greater flexibility in terms of cost and configuration of systems whilst promoting cross-field collaboration and information flow.