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The success of our project depended on forming a trusting, collaborative relationship with teachers and conducting in-depth interviews with adolescents who had never met our team. Yet, when we were ready to launch this work, it was not safe to meet with teachers or students in-person due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nor was it possible to conduct site visits to the school. How could we continue collaborative module development and conduct meaningful research when the in-person methods we planned for our study were no longer feasible given the health and safety challenges of the pandemic? Our team had to make important decisions about module development and deployment while keeping students' and teachers' health and safety in mind. Rather than focusing on the problems of being unable to perform face-to-face data collection or module development, we began exploring new and alternative technological solutions. Building trust and engaging teachers while negotiating the communicative and relational restrictions inherent in online interactions was another challenge addressed in the paper. 

The urgency for remote, reliable and scalable biodiversity monitoring amidst mounting human pressures on ecosystems has sparked worldwide interest in Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM), which can track life underwater and on land. However, we lack a unified methodology to report this sampling effort and a comprehensive overview of PAM coverage to gauge its potential as a global research and monitoring tool. To address this gap, we created the Worldwide Soundscapes project, a collaborative network and growing database comprising metadata from 416 datasets across all realms (terrestrial, marine, freshwater and subterranean).