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discussion / Acoustics  / 3 April 2026

Data in the Data

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Hi All - I gave a talk recently on northern leopard frogs, and in the following discussions, it turned out that some colleagues with ARUs deployed for birds have been getting summaries for amphibian calls. They are using a third party to do their detections, but it made me wonder about a couple of things: 

1. Are there repositories of ARU recordings from known locations that can be screened for non-target taxa? 

2. Are people already looking for other species data in bird and bat acoustic monitoring datasets? 

As a caveat - I'm not really an acoustic guy, so please forgive me if my quick lit/web searches have missed something. Anyway, know folks are working on amphibian detections, but is anyone doing squirrel detections? Tree and ground squirrels (at least in my area) are quite vocal. 

And insects - I originally forgot to add insect detections.

thanks

Stephen



Karina Torres
@torresk  | she/her
MS Forestry Student at SIU; PEASE Lab
Involvement level 1

20 April 2026 12:15am

I am not very up to date on bioacoustics literature and relevant acoustic datasets, but I do know that researchers are definitely using ARUs to detect frog calls and insects, and also creating deep learning models to classify their calls in the same way we do for birds and bat acoustics data. I think bioacoustic monitoring for mammalian species is a little less common (besides cetaceans and bats), but the methods are still applicable to vocal mammals  like squirrels and moles. 

Chris Nicholas
@chrisgnicholas  | he/him/it
Society for Conservation GIS
IT 'Forest Gump' veteran in remote sensing/location services/XR/IoT ML/Agentic AI
Conversation starter level 2
Poster level 1
Commenter level 2

21 April 2026 2:44am

I recently was at the Los Amigos station, and just for fun turned on my Audiomoth at high frequency (~100khz) and got some crazy frog chorus recordings (along with bats and insects, etc) at a mosquito-infested pond in the Amazon. I too am indeed am looking for where to begin...

Stephen Petersen
@stephenresearch  | he/him
Assiniboine Park Conservancy
Conservation biologist and keen naturalist - very interested in using tech for conservation science. Based in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada.
Involvement level 1

21 April 2026 10:19pm

Thanks folks

As I think about this more. I wonder how many ARUs also collect temperature data, as if I remember correctly, this modulates insects (crickets and grasshoppers), and maybe some frog calls (grey tree frogs in my area). We just ordered a couple ARUs but I dont think that temperature is recorded so I will need to zip tie a temp logger to it when we deploy them. Does anyone know if this is an issue that others have encountered? 

Cheers

Stephen