Analysis Service Terms

The Company processes the Client's acoustic recordings with machine-learning models, validates a sample of the detections by expert review, calibrates the results, and reports them at the measurement level the Client chooses: species presence, site occupancy, or density proxy.

The scope of each project (measurement level, target species, devices, recording period and deliverables) is agreed in writing before analysis begins.

Study design advice is included with any commissioned analysis, up to 10 hours per project. Further advice is charged at the Company's hourly rate, agreed in advance.

Before analysis begins, the Company will tell the Client if it believes the design is unlikely to answer the Client's question. The Client may proceed regardless.

Open: whether the 10 hours applies when the Client doesn't go on to commission analysis, and the hourly rate beyond it.

Monitoring projects. Charged at a monthly rate set by the measurement level, the number of target species (for occupancy) and the number of devices recording at the same time, as shown in the estimate. Rates apply per month of recording, with a minimum study length of three months, and cover up to 10 devices. Months beyond the first twelve are charged at a reduced long-term rate. Density is charged at 2.5 times the occupancy rate. The monthly rate is fixed once the scope is agreed.

Processing and storage. Included in the monthly rate of a monitoring project.

Pro subscription. $50 per month, including 500 audio-hours processed per month and 100 GB of storage. Additional processing is $0.08 per audio-hour and additional storage $0.10 per gigabyte per month. The Client may set a spending cap; a batch that would exceed it does not start until the cap is raised or the batch reduced.

Hardware and fieldwork. The Company does not supply hardware or carry out fieldwork.

All prices are in New Zealand dollars and include GST. Rates may change with 30 days' notice. Agreed monthly rates do not change.

Open: payment terms, deposit on multi-year projects, and whether multi-year projects are scoped per reporting year or as a whole.

Results are calibrated against the expert-validated sample and reported with confidence intervals. They describe what the recordings support, conditional on that sample.

Acoustic methods cannot detect species that do not call, and some designs will not give a conclusive answer. The fee covers the analysis and its honestly reported uncertainty. It does not guarantee a detection, a particular result, or a conclusive one.

The Client is responsible for how results are used, including in regulatory or published work. The Company will explain the methods and their limits on request.

Open: wording for regulatory absence claims and “peer-review ready” reports, and a liability cap. Needs a lawyer.

The Client owns its recordings, metadata and results. The Client chooses one of: private (used only for the Client's analyses), model contribution (anonymised samples may train and evaluate the Company's models), or open (released publicly).

Model contribution is never the default. For data held by or relating to iwi and hapū, the Company will agree how the data is used, shared and stored with the kaitiaki before any processing, consistent with Māori data sovereignty principles.

Recordings are processed and stored in Google Cloud's australia-southeast1 (Sydney) region, or in a Client-owned bucket in the same region.

Open: whether a New Zealand hosting region is needed before working with NZ clients.

Bat (ultrasonic) and marine surveys, and near-real-time biosecurity alerting, are quoted and contracted separately.