Conclusion and future directions
In this study, we have demonstrated the possibility of building high quality single call recognisers for monitoring ecosystem restoration. While testing the recognisers on data collected before and after watering would determine their precision in responding to actual restoration, we expect the response to be sharp as precision and recall scored high for most species. If sharp responses are found, we encourage testing transferability of recognisers to other locations as site specificity of recognisers has rarely been investigated. Amphibians are also not the only soniferous taxonomic group that responds to environmental watering. Birds were responsible for the bulk of the manually annotated response curves described by Linke & Deretic (2020). We strongly encourage additional studies that build call recognisers for water-dependent birds or alternatively trial the performance of a pre-built recogniser such as BirdNet (Kahl et al., 2021). This has the potential to lay the foundation for a real-time monitoring system that can detect the ecological outcomes of environmental water allocations in the Murray-Darling Basin – a milestone in the management of a stressed, but recovering, river.