Santa Cruz Mountains Marbled Murrelet Monitoring

Project Goal
The Marbled Murrelet is a seabird that breeds in coastal old growth forests from Alaska to California. Listed as threatened by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (1992), the species faces a number of pressures including habitat loss, oil pollution, fisheries interactions, and predation from corvids. Marbled Murrelets spend much of their life at sea, and typically return to inland breeding sites under the cover of darkness. This secretive behavior makes Marbled Murrelets notoriously difficult to detect and monitor. The Santa Cruz Mountains are at the southern edge of the species’ breeding range and a critical region for monitoring their distribution and trends in the face of habitat loss and threats at sea. A consortium of government agencies and non-profits operating throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains collaborate in their efforts to study and protect this species

Conservation Metrics
Acoustic monitoring can dramatically increase the temporal and geographic scale of surveys for rare and elusive species, while thousands of hours of field recordings can be processed with pattern recognition software to derive measures of acoustic activity rates by species of interest. Conservation Metrics has been collaborating with groups throughout the Santa Cruz Mountains since our founding, helping provide powerful tools to enable robust landscape-scale monitoring programs for Marbled Murrelets.