Biodiversity Action Planning & Bioacoustics Monitoring on UK Farms and Estates
Whether you are looking to strengthen your farm or estate’s biodiversity action plan, want clear evidence of red-list or protected bird species on your land, or simply wish to understand more about how your habitats are being used through the seasons - we can help. By combining practical management advice, traditional survey methods and latest monitoring, reporting and verification (MRV) technology, including bioacoustics, we will work with you to build a clear, reliable picture of the wildlife on your land and how best to support it.
Biodiversity action planning is central to sustainable farm and estate management in the UK whether you are in environmental stewardship schemes, looking to satisfy biodiversity net gain requirements or realise your own, long-term vision.
Land managers want to do more than check regulatory boxes and are seeking robust, data-driven methods to track outcomes. One of the most powerful and emerging tools in this space is bioacoustics - the collection and analysis of environmental sound to monitor wildlife. On this page, we explore how properly-implemented and verified bioacoustics monitoring (especially, but by no means exclusively, of birds) can provide deep insights, reduce uncertainty and strengthen your evidence for wildlife and protected/red list species.
Why monitoring matters for biodiversity action plans
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A robust, verified and scientifically reliable baseline is essential - knowing what species are present (e.g. red List and protected birds), their abundance and diversity and how habitats are functioning in practice.
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Demonstrating compliance and meeting current and future policy or funding requirements (e.g. stewardship, nature recovery, biodiversity net gain) requires evidence. Acoustic monitoring provides repeatable, verifiable data, which our expert team can transform into actionable insights for you and your business.
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Tracking change over time - habitats, land use and climate change all affect species. Without long-term data, it's difficult to know whether interventions (e.g. hedgerows, buffer strips, habitat restoration) are working, and to develop a long-term strategy.
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Birds are good farmland or estate biodiversity bio-indicators - many Red List bird species are vocal and detectable acoustically, including rare, nocturnal and elusive ones.
If we are to track the changing fortunes of species and habitats, we must start now with robust acoustic baselines. Standardised, long-term sound recordings give us a unique ability to measure change across farms, estates and landscapes in ways that visual surveys alone cannot.
What is bioacoustics monitoring?
Bioacoustics monitoring is the recording of sound made by organisms (for example bird calls, bat echolocation or insect stridulations), paired with expert analysis to identify activity, species richness and abundance. We will deploy a number of recording units (ARUs / passive acoustic monitors), depending on the project scope and size, and take care of the sampling protocol, data handling and analysis, statistical methodology, practical insight, wider context building and presentation.
In addition to species-level detection, we can include metrics like acoustic complexity, temporal entropy and biophony/anthrophony to describe the soundscape as a whole. The information you get will be tailored to your specific needs and presented in a format that is practically useful.
How bioacoustics add value for farms and estates
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Superior detection, including nocturnal or shy birds, and suspected but not visually confirmed species. Acoustic recording can catch early morning, dawn, dusk or nighttime calls that traditional surveys may miss.
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Scaling up and cost-effectiveness - once set up, monitoring devices allow continuous or semi-continuous monitoring, reducing fieldwork time and capturing more robust information.
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Actionable insights for habitat management - identifying which habitats are used most, which are under-performing (e.g. from species richness or activity metrics) and timing of vocalisation can inform when to restore and when to adjust management (e.g. cutting, grazing and drilling.)
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Reporting and compliance - data from our bioacoustics monitoring can feed into a wide range of reports, applications and assessments. It's flexible and can be adapted easily, and combined with other data source, to suit your particular requirement.
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Benchmarking and trend analysis - over time, eco-acoustic data enables more robust trend analysis, and future-proofs your baseline.
Acoustic monitoring offers more than just an efficient way to collect wildlife data, it creates a permanent, verifiable record of our soundscapes. These recordings become time capsules that can be re-analysed, compared across years and used to uncover patterns invisible or very difficult and costly to extract from traditional surveys
Integrating bioacoustics and biodiversity planning
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Baseline first - ideally before an intervention or land use change, we can set up acoustic monitoring to establish presence or absence, species richness and key habitats used.
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Setting goals - we can help tie monitoring to explicit targets around biodiversity on your land and the wider landscape.
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Management decisions - using all available data and ecological assessments, we can guide you on which habitats to introduce, restore or enhance (e.g. buffer strips, hedgerow creation, wetland, cover crops) for maximum impact.
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Policy, compliance and funding alignment - we will help ensure that your ecological data is engaging, clear and practically useable, and monitoring does not just result in a long, wordy report.
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Review and adaptation - we will help you monitor year-on-year changes, refine sensor placement, detection algorithms and reporting.
Final words
At Oakbank, we believe that bioacoustics monitoring offers some of the most powerful, under-used opportunities for farms and estates to monitor what natural capital they already have and build credible biodiversity action plans. We focus on birds first (with special attention to Red List and protected species), but understand how the tools scale to bats and insects too.
Our interest is in not just collecting sounds but extracting the maximum insight: using robust statistical tools, integrating with other monitoring, aligning with compliance and funding, and presenting everything in a way that is accessible, engaging and actionable.
If you are considering how to baseline, monitor, report or compare habitats over time, or want to explore what acoustic data might reveal about your land, we’d be happy to share perspectives and to partner with you.