Patrick Hart, Professor of Biology

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Professor Hart’s areas of research are in behavioral ecology, community ecology, and conservation of Hawaiian forests and forest birds.

At left, red ʻakepa bird in lehua tree. At right, Prof. Patrick Hart casual portrait in t-shirt, outdoor setting.
Bright orange ʻakepa bird in lehua tree and Prof. Patrick Hart.

Posted Jan. 29, 2026.

Patrick Hart is a professor of biology at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo. His areas of expertise are in behavioral ecology, community ecology, and conservation of Hawaiian forests and forest birds. The arc of his career has led him to profound research breakthroughs on forest birds — their habitats, distribution, diseases — resulting in significant contributions to the literature.

“Early in my career I was part of a group of researchers that demonstrated for the first time that some Honeycreeper species living in lowland habitats on Hawaiʻi are becoming tolerant to avian malaria,” says Hart. “Later, I worked on forest dynamics and tree age at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge and demonstrated that our ʻōhiʻa trees are among the oldest broadleaf trees in the Northern Hemisphere. For much of the past 15 years our lab has focused on characterizing how the song of Hawaiian birds varies across space and time, and how we can use that song to monitor changes in the birds distribution and abundance.”

Learn more in published research:

The relationships between habitat variables and bird distribution, abundance, and demography as they relate to the conservation of Hawaiian forest birds has been a major theme of much of Hart’s past and current research (learn more on his website).

Currently, Hart has four basic research areas:

  1. the use of bioacoustics to address a variety of questions relating to bird conservation and behavior in both Hawaiʻi and Costa Rica,
  2. dendrochronology to better understand the history and dynamics of Hawaiian forests and climate,
  3. Hawaiian forest bird inventory and monitoring, and
  4. Hawaiian forest inventory and monitoring.

For all projects, Hart and his team have active collaborations with local, national, and international researchers.

Hart has a baccalaureate degree (1985) from University of California at Santa Barbara, and a doctoral degree in zoology from UH Mānoa (2000). His doctoral dissertation addresses aspects of behavioral and community ecology of native forest birds at Hakalau Forest NWR on Hawaiʻi Island. He then spent three-plus years as a post-doc with the federally-funded Biocomplexity of Avian Disease project in Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and began as an assistant professor at UH Hilo in 2005.

LOHE Bioacoustics Lab

LOHE Bioaccoustics Lab logo, University of Hawaii at Hilo, Listening Observatory for Hawaiian Ecosystems.Hart’s bioacoustics lab was launched in 2014 and quickly made great strides in advancing the field of ecology. Co-founders of the lab were two UH Hilo colleagues: former biology professor Donald Price (now at University of Nevada, Las Vegas) and Adam Pack, an associate professor of psychology at the time (now full tenured professor at UH Hilo) who specializes in marine mammal behavior.

The lab goes by the Hawaiian name LOHE, which means “to perceive with the ear” and is an acronym for Listening Observatory for Hawaiian Ecosystems. The launch of the facility was made possible through a Centers of Research Excellence in Science and Technology (CREST) grant awarded by the National Science Foundation and has been home to many projects over the years from Hawaiʻi to Costa Rica.

“We conducted a study in Costa Rica that showed that cicada noise has a huge influence on how and when bird species in the forest can communicate with each other,” says Hart when asked what the most surprising find in his research has been.

In one project, Hart discovered complex communication strategies in bird species found in both Costa Rica and Hawaiʻi forests.

The science of combining biology and acoustics

The core mission of the LOHE lab is founded in the use of bioacoustics (the science of combining biology and acoustics) to understand forest ecology.

“We’re using sound in lots of different aspects of ecology,” explains Hart. “We’re trying to use sound to better understand the distribution and abundance of animals and how the richness of their vocal repertoire changes with population size and across the landscape.”

One of the goals of the lab is to document the vocalizations of native Hawaiian species to have as a reference for the future. “We are basically trying to create a library of native Hawaiian animal sounds,” says Hart.

The bulk of this investigation is on Hawaiʻi’s native forest birds.

“There’s no native mammals in Hawaiʻi, there’s no native reptiles or amphibians,” Hart explains in a CNN interview. “And so birds played this really important ecological role as pollinators and seed dispersers. But in the last few hundred years, incredible levels of extinction in a lot of different groups of birds.”

In collaborative efforts that include the help of local landowners and support through federal grants, Hart, his lab staff and students (both graduate and undergraduate as part of their studies and internships) have been recording forest soundscapes for months at a time over many years, strategically placing recording devices throughout the forest and uploading the files to computers, then analyzing that data; the work at Hakalau Forest NWR has been continuous for over 10 years. It’s been tedious, taking untold hours and hours of time collecting and analyzing the data.

Huge technological boost with AI

Throughout these years of research, as forest bird populations continue to decline throughout the state, Prof. Hart has been trying to improve how researchers track those population trends both in the field and in the lab. And now a huge technological boost is here: Hart and his research team are developing artificial intelligence programs to help with both monitoring bird populations in Hawaiʻi’s forests and processing the lab’s huge database of bird song.

“We’re just at the point of being able to rapidly analyze huge amounts of soundscape data to answer questions that could not be answered until now,” says Hart in an interview with UH System News.

“One of the things that we need to do, to be able to manage our forest birds, is to have better information on where they are and how many of them there are,” Hart says in a Hawaiʻi Public Radio interview. “It’s been really hard to get that with our traditional techniques where we send people out in the forest and count them.”

Now the lab team is focusing on installing passive acoustic recorder networks in forest bird habitat across Hawaiʻi and further developing AI tools to automatically analyze those recordings to monitor bird populations. The new AI recording analysis is already being implemented across the state with partners such as Haleakalā National Park on Maui with plans to expand the efforts across the Pacific to Pohnpei, Palau, and Guam.

While launching the new AI system of gathering and processing birdsong, the research team is simultaneously developing AI to process the large database already collected over the past decade.

Meanwhile, Prof. Hart continues trying to improve how researchers track forest bird population trends.

“For the future we would like to streamline the sound analysis process so we can monitor populations in real time,” he says.

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By Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of Keaohou and UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.