Matthew Mckown

• PhD
• CEO at Conservation Metrics, Inc.

Machine learning has the potential to revolutionize passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) for ecological assessments. However, high annotation and computing costs limit the field’s adoption. Generalizable pretrained networks can overcome these costs, but high-quality pretraining requires vast annotated libraries, limiting their current development to d...

Although drones are a promising alternative to traditional wildlife monitoring methods, validation efforts are needed to quantify the accuracy of abundance and distribution estimates obtained from using drones. We used drones equipped with high‐resolution Red‐Green‐Blue (RGB) and thermal cameras, coupled with machine learning techniques, to assess...

Seabirds are integral components of marine ecosystems and, with many populations globally threatened, there is a critical need for effective and scalable seabird monitoring strategies. Many seabird species nest in burrows, which can make traditional monitoring methods costly, infeasible, or damaging to nesting habitats. Traditional burrow occupancy...

Hawaii’s only 2 endemic seabirds, Newell’s Shearwater (Puffinus auricularis newelli) and Hawaiian Petrel (Pterodroma sandwichensis), are listed under the United States Endangered Species Act. Threats to both species include light attraction and fallout, collisions with power lines and other structures, predation by invasive animals, and habitat deg...

Marine megafauna are difficult to observe and count because many species travel widely and spend large amounts of time submerged. As such, management programmes seeking to conserve these species are often hampered by limited information about population levels. Unoccupied aircraft systems (UAS, aka drones) provide a potentially useful technique for...

Rat eradication has become a common conservation intervention in island ecosystems and its effectiveness in protecting native vertebrates is increasingly well documented. Yet, the impacts of rat eradication on plant communities remain poorly understood. Here we compare native and non-native tree and palm seedling abundance before and after eradicat...

Fifteen years of precipitation on Palmyra Atoll. Rainfall on Palmyra Atoll from 2002 to 2017. Survey month and two months prior to the survey period are highlighted (red dots = pre-eradication and blue dots = post-eradication). Horizontal lines indicate average rainfall and one standard deviation. (TIF)

Count of locally rare tree seedling plots. (DOCX)

The Band-rumped Storm-petrel (BRSP) Oceanodroma castro has a large breeding range, spanning the warmer portions of both the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. The Hawaiian population is one of the most cryptic and under-studied seabird species in the archipelago, and its breeding phenology and distribution are poorly known. We used several methods, inclu...

The number and scale of island invasive species eradications is growing, but quantitative evidence of the conservation efficacy of passive recovery is limited. We compare relative abundances of breeding birds on Hawadax Island (formerly named Rat island), Aleutian Archipelago, Alaska, pre- and post- rat eradication to examine short-term (<1 year po...

Measuring the response of native species to conservation actions is necessary to 27 inform continued improvement of conservation practices. This is particularly true for 28 eradications of invasive vertebrates from islands where up-front costs are high, actions 29 may be controversial, and there is potential for negative impacts to native (“non-tar...

Ashy Storm-Petrels (ASSP) breed in a range restricted to the southern California Current, from Mendocino County in northern California, United States, to the Coronado Islands in northwest Baja California, Mexico. Approximately half the global population nests on the California Channel Islands, but nesting at one of them, Anacapa Island, had not bee...

Autonomous sensors and automated analysis have great potential to reduce cost and increaseefficacy ofwildlifemonitoring.Byincreasingsampling effort, autonomoussensors arepowerfulat detecting rareandelusivespeciessuchasthemarbledmurrelet(Brachyramphusmarmoratus).Newapproachesmustbetestedforcomparability to existing methodologies, so we compared the...

Healthy ecosystems with intact biodiversity provide human societies with valuable services such as clean air and water, storm protection, tourism, medicine, food, and cultural resources. Protecting this natural capital is one of the great challenges of our era. Species extinction and ecological degradation steadily continues despite conservation fu...

Little is known about the conservation requirements of Bryan’s Shearwater Puffinus bryani, first described in 2011 based on a specimen collected in February 1963 near an area containing concrete rubble at Midway Atoll. Here we document a second Bryan’s Shearwater observed on Midway during the winters of 1990/91 and 1991/92. It was vocalizing from a...

Population size assessments for nocturnal burrow-nesting seabirds are logistically challenging because these species are active in colonies only during darkness and often nest on remote islands where manual inspections of breeding burrows are not feasible. Many seabird species are highly vocal, and recent technological innovations now make it possi...

Although wildlife conservation actions have increased globally in number and complexity, the lack of scalable, cost‐effective monitoring methods limits adaptive management and the evaluation of conservation efficacy. Automated sensors and computer‐aided analyses provide a scalable and increasingly cost‐effective tool for conservation monitoring. A...

Population size assessments for nocturnal burrow-nesting seabirds are logistically challenging because these species are active in colonies only during darkness and often nest on remote islands where manual inspections of breeding burrows are not feasible. Many seabird species are highly vocal, and recent technological innovations now make it possi...

Seabirds are the most threatened marine group with nearly 28% of extant species considered at risk of extinction. Managers and researchers face considerable financial and logistical challenges when designing programs to monitor the status of any of the 97 species listed as critically endangered, endangered, or vulnerable by the IUCN. These challeng...

We are developing an open-source, low-cost wildlife and environmental monitoring solution based on Android smartphones. Using a smartphone instead of a traditional microcontroller or single board computer has several advantages: smartphones are single integrated devices with multiple radios and a battery; they have a robust software interface which...

This chapter demonstrates solutions to damages done to island ecosystems. It cites David Cameron Duffy's 1994 study where he observed that feral animals, diseases, and forest destruction had greatly modified island ecosystems that most were unrecognizable. It highlights how most island management projects focus only on the restoration of single or...