https://asa.scitation.org/doi/10.1121/1.5138593

Here's an article about bird localisation using passive acoustic methods

Some years ago we started an expert poll on the question up to which distance birds can be detected by accoustics with high probability during the mapping of breeding birds.

Unfortunately we did not have enough participants in the poll but here you can see the first results:

hoerbereiche.blogspot.com

Yes

Thanks for the hints! I also found some studies comparing human observers with autonoums sound recording. It is obviously a very laborious task and normally it only leads to rough estimates. Most of the authors are confident, that autonomus sound recording (ASR) outperforms human observation in many ways, but i guess a lot more research is nessesary, if ASR should be a part of environmental assesments. The question will be: How good has ASR to be, considering that human observers are not perfect as well.

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I would say that we humans still are excellent in pinpointing the distance, direction and to judge if the caller is a lonely male, or one who gotten a mate, eggs and now defend his territory.

But as a human cannot be on location at all times, I agree that autonomous recording systems have its use as well.

Erin Bayne's lab, in Alberta, works in this kind of topics, maybe they could give you an answer