Designing duty cycles for acoustic time budgets

Equal recording effort does not imply equal information about acoustic encounters or their durations. This methods note synthesises published subsampling experiments and diel acoustic research to connect recording schedules with clearly defined time-budget metrics. A hypothetical ten-percent duty-cycle comparison shows that frequent short windows can increase the probability of encountering a brief bout while leaving expected recorded bout time unchanged. The analysis distinguishes daily presence, sampled audible time, call counts, and censored encounter lengths, then examines schedule synchronisation, biological timing, and continuous pilot records. It provides no universal correction factor and does not equate acoustic activity with animal abundance or feeding time. Its practical recommendation is to evaluate the intended metric under candidate schedules rather than selecting a recording percentage alone.