How to count bird calls? Vocal activity indices may provide different insights into bird abundance and behaviour depending on species traits

Abstract Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has become an important tool for surveying birds, and there is a growing demand for approaches to obtain abundance and behavioural information from PAM recordings. Changes in bird populations have been assessed by counting recorded calls and calculating the vocal activity rate (VAR, i.e. the number of calls per recording time). However, bird calls could be counted in various ways and depending on species traits, these call counts could give us different insights on bird abundance, vocal behaviour and/or habitat use. Our study had two goals: (1) to present and evaluate two new indices based on call counts, the detection rate (DR, i.e. the number of 1‐min recordings in which the presence of a target vocalization is detected) and the maximum count per minute (MAX, i.e. the maximum number of calls found in a 1‐min recording); and (2) to present a conceptual framework showing how the interpretations of VAR, DR and MAX could depend on the index and on species traits. For three Neotropical bird species with distinct traits, we calculated VAR, DR and MAX based on PAM data from 25 sites in the Yucatan Peninsula (Mexico) that varied in their degree of anthropogenic habitat disturbance. We found moderate to high correlations between the indices and higher temporal variability in VAR compared to DR and MAX. We also found different effect sizes of habitat disturbance on the three species and indices. We suggest that DR might be a more reliable index of relative abundance than VAR for species whose calling behaviour exhibits a high cue rate and that MAX may be suitable for estimating family or flock size in gregarious birds. Our findings show the potential usefulness of developing new indices based on call counts to generate ecological hypotheses and assess changes in bird abundance and behaviour.