Study area and data collection
The Forestry Corporation of NSW provided two years of acoustic data files recorded between February 2018 and February 2020. A SongMeter 3 or SongMeter 4 (Wildlife Acoustics Inc.) sound recorder was deployed at each of the 20 study sites (see Appendix 1) in the KP Forest. Prior to January 2019, each recorder recorded five minutes of audio per day at dusk. The start time of each recording changed according to the time of sunset that day. From the acoustic data provided by the Forestry Corporation of NSW, eight frog species were identified as potential indicators of ecological health. A list of previously annotated detections (i.e. times, dates, and locations that these frogs had been detected via manual listening) was also provided by the Forestry Corporation of NSW (see Table 1 for the number of files where the candidate frog species were present in annotated files).
Table 1 Count of annotated evaluation files where calls of candidate frog species were present