Acoustic sensors enable efficient and non-invasive monitoring of a wide range of species, including many that are difficult to monitor in other ways. Although they were initially limited in application scope largely due to cost and hardware constraints, the development of low-cost, open-source models like the Audiomoth in recent years has increased access immensely and opened up new avenues of research. For example, some teams are using them to identify illicit human activities through the detection of associated sounds, like gunshots, vehicles, or chainsaws (e.g. OpenEars).
With this relatively novel dimension of wildlife monitoring rapidly advancing in both marine and terrestrial systems, it is crucial that we identify and share information about the utility and constraints of these sensors to inform efforts. A recent study identified advancements in hardware and machine learning applications, as well as early development of acoustic biodiversity indicators, as factors facilitating progress in the field. In terms of limitations, the authors highlight insufficient reference sound libraries, a lack of open-source audio processing tools, and a need for standardization of survey and analysis protocols. They also stress the importance of collaboration in moving forward, which is precisely what this group will aim to facilitate.
If you're new to acoustic monitoring and want to get up to speed on the basics, check out these beginner's resources and conversations from across the WILDLABS platform:
Three Resources for Beginners:
- Listening to Nature: The Emerging Field of Bioacoustics, Adam Welz
- Ecoacoustics and Biodiversity Monitoring, RSEC Journal
- Monitoring Ecosystems through Sound: The Present and Future of Passive Acoustics, Ella Browning and Rory Gibb
Three Forum Threads for Beginners:
- AudioMoth user guide | Tessa Rhinehart
- Audiomoth and Natterjack Monitoring (UK) | Stuart Newson
- Help with analysing bat recordings from Audiomoth | Carlos Abrahams
Three Tutorials for Beginners:
- "How do I perform automated recordings of bird assemblages?" | Carlos Abrahams, Tech Tutors
- "How do I scale up acoustic surveys with Audiomoths and automated processing?" | Tessa Rhinehart, Tech Tutors
- Acoustic Monitoring | David Watson, Ruby Lee, Andy Hill, and Dimitri Ponirakis, Virtual Meetups
Want to know more about acoustic monitoring and learn from experts in the WILDLABS community? Jump into the discussion in our Acoustic Monitoring group!
Header image: Carly Batist
- @Theresa
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- @Andrew_Hill
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Open Acoustic Devices
I am co-founder of Open Acoustic Devices, the creators of AudioMoth and HydroMoth. My background is Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
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- @alex_rogers
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University of Oxford
I am a Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford where I work on developing novel low-cost conservation technology (including AudioMoth and SnapperGPS).
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- @fmnrandrew
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I hold a PhD in terrestrial ecology (2010) and am an Adjunct Research Fellow at Charles Sturt University. I also work with World Vision Australia as Monitoring Coordinator for a project called "Scale Up FMNR" which is short for "Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration"
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- @Iniunam
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Conservation Biologist, Data Analyst and Bioacoustics enthusiast
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Aditya Pal, born in Janakpur, Nepal, received his master’s degree in Zoology from Central Department of Zoology, Tribhuvan University, Nepal in 2019. His master’s thesis is in wetland birds of Koshi Tappu Wildlife Reserve. At present, he is working as a Research assistant at Hima
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- @sbombaci
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I study acoustic ecology, community ecology, and social justice in conservation
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- @garthpaine
- | He/Him
Arizona State University
Garth Paine (https://www.activatedspace.com/ ) is acoustic ecologist, composer, sound artist, and academic (ASU) based in USA/Australia. He is known for his pioneering work on species density metrics from ambient recordings and his anti-poaching efforts
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Natural Solutions
Engineer, Ph.D in Computation Ecology. Interested in developing tools for the massive acquisition of high dimensional data from new technologies (e.g., imaging, omics), their analysis and visualization.
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Researcher interested in the conservation of endemic anurans from arid High Andes. Focused on behavior, ecology, physiology, and reproduction studies. Education for conservation.
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Hussey Labs seeks a senior post-doctoral researcher/senior research associate for movement ecology of Greenland halibut in the context of fisheries management across Baffin Bay-Davis Strait, Eastern Canadian Arctic.
13 March 2024
Catch up on the conservation tech discussions and events that happened during World Wildlife Day 2024!
7 March 2024
Do you know anyone interested in this position? Let them know by sharing widely.
27 February 2024
The Ecological Acoustics and Behavior Lab at the University of New Hampshire seeks a PhD student to join our lab to investigate how forest habitat affects moose occupancy and soundscape in northern New Hampshire
13 February 2024
The primary focus of the research is to explore how red deer movements, space use, habitat selection and foraging behaviour change during the wolf recolonization process.
10 February 2024
Applications open for a PhD position in plant vibroacoustics at the University of Southampton
8 February 2024
We demonstrate the power of using passive acoustic monitoring & machine learning to survey species, using ruffed lemurs in southeastern Madagascar as an example.
23 January 2024
Come join our team! We're looking for a Program Officer to join the WILDLABS Community, hosted by WCS in Argentina. This role will support our research program, with the chosen candidate leading our horizon scanning...
22 January 2024
Careers
We're hiring ecologists for immediate start / remote working / short contract
19 January 2024
Two years in Cape Town, South Africa. Yearly visits to Rwanda. If you love to code, and all things Python/deep learning/tech stuff/ then you'll have an awesome time!
16 January 2024
This article discussed early work on modeling how acoustic properties of the environment will change with variations in weather.
9 January 2024
Analysing recordings of gunshots could help save endangered species around the world by identifying poacher hotspots.
7 January 2024
April 2024
event
July 2024
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July 2023
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June 2023
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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We could always use more contributors in open source projects. In most open source companies Red Hat, Anaconda, Red Hat and Mozilla, people often ended up getting hired largely... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Early Career, Marine Conservation | 3 days 18 hours ago | |
We suggest and use Python Locks for urban areas here in Australia. Can also screw the Mini 2 to a tree or phone post with the python lock. |
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Acoustics | 4 days 1 hour ago | |
Hello everyone, I'm interested in gathering insights on how the behavior of different species impacts the development and efficacy of... |
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Biologging, Acoustics, Camera Traps, eDNA & Genomics, Emerging Tech, Marine Conservation | 6 days 3 hours ago | |
Thank you Carly, I will definitely take a look. |
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Acoustics, Biologging, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 1 week 1 day ago | |
If you're interested in a free, no-code ecoacoustic analysis platform for your data, check out Arbimon! |
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Acoustics | 1 week 2 days ago | |
Hi @timbirdweather I've now got them up and running and winding how I can provide feedback on species ID to improve the accuracy over time. It would be really powerful to have a... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Citizen Science, Emerging Tech | 1 week 5 days ago | |
Hi Hubert,There's been some research into which batteries are most effective with ARUs, and there's some results here: Battery quality can vary greatly, especially NiMh.... |
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Acoustics | 2 weeks 3 days ago | |
Really interesting project. Interesting chip set you found. With up to around 2mb sram that’s quite a high memory for a ultra low power soc I think.It might also be... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation | 2 weeks 5 days ago | |
Hi everyone, I am currently working on the vocal repertoire of an Amazon turtle species and would appreciate if someone would be open... |
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Acoustics | 3 weeks 3 days ago | |
Thank you so much for your encouraging words! I'm thrilled to hear that you enjoyed our conversation, and I truly appreciate your support in spreading the word about my survey... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation | 1 month ago | |
I heard it through industry chatter but can't find a news release on it yet. |
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Acoustics | 1 month ago | |
Hi everyone,I posted this mystery recording to Twitter already, but perhaps this forum will have more ideas... Over the years, my lab... |
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Acoustics | 1 month ago |
Deploying 'Ears' in Ecosystems: Using Bioacoustics to Monitor Bird Species
21 October 2021 12:00am
What value would you place on regular status updates from your acoustic recorder?
23 September 2021 1:13am
18 October 2021 7:36am
Hi Astaras, I'm Mark Calder one of the engineers at Frontier Labs. Yes we think that the energy used in sending a message by satellite once per week will get quickly replaced with the solar panel. We plan to send a short message with battery capacity remaining and card space remaining once per week typically. Probably also that sound was recorded in the last recording period. That is the microphone signal output was not flat fine. That can happen if the mic is broken off for example.
Obviously if you don't get a message from one of your recorders at the set time then that's cause for concern. It can take 4 hours to aquire a satellite and send the message though so you'd probably wait until the next day to make that judgement. The battery in a Solar BAR lasts for about a month with 24/7 recording if there is no more solar so it should be able to send out messages during long rain periods.
We'll be starting this project later this year. If you can think of other info to have in the messages please let me know. My email is [email protected] if that's more convenient.
18 October 2021 4:35pm
Hi Nicole--
We've already chatted about this function, and I think the answer is "quite a bit" for a lot of deployments. The more accurately the proposed function tracked microphone status the better, though even something to the effect of "I'm still getting a signal from this microphone" even if there was no more nuanced quality information than a yes/no would still be better than what much of the field is doing right now.
I think the question is how much this would add to the cost of the unit + how much whatever data service you're using would add to the ongoing costs but I'd imagine that Frontier are still figuring out those specifics.
Tech Tutors: How do I analyze large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?
14 October 2021 3:42pm
Technical Difficulties: What’s The Worst That Can Happen?
12 October 2021 12:00am
Arbimon terms of service
7 October 2021 5:24pm
8 October 2021 8:36pm
Hi David!
It sounds like Rainforest Connection and its affiliates reserve the right to use your acoustic data and its labels to train and/or test sound identification algorithms.
In my opinion, Rainforest Connection is unlikely to "scoop" the direct ecological or conservation research outputs of your data, which could be what your collaborators would be most concerned about.
However, if one of your research goals is methods development (e.g. publishing trained sound classifiers or experimenting with different machine learning approaches), you may want to directly ask Rainforest Connection for clarification on this part of their terms of service.
Sidenote: one the most significant bottlenecks for developing accurate machine learning classifiers is a lack of labeled data. The bioacoustics community would certainly benefit from the open publication of more labeled data!
Tessa
11 October 2021 3:24pm
Tessa--
Thanks for chiming in. I agree with a lot of what you're saying, both about what RFCX is likely to actually be doing and about the need for more open labeled datasets. However, unfortunately, a lot of times the academic incentives of individual research groups don't align well with the needs of the field more broadly.
This honestly might be a good topic for a broader discussion: how do we balance the ideals of a strongly FOSS-influenced conservation tech field with the incentives of academia, which include both publishing and (in the case of some universities including mine) monetizing data and research.
How do I analyze large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?
7 October 2021 12:00am
Bioacoustics Webinar: Creatures of the Night
4 October 2021 12:00am
Incidental recording of people (in an IRB context)
30 June 2021 5:13pm
2 July 2021 3:01pm
I haven't needed to go through an IRB for acoustic collections yet, but I have had landowners ask this. My response has been that we filter out incidental conversations with ML automatically. For an IRB, you will probably need to be specific about how and when you do this. The responses I have had have been very mixed and any objections are based on incorrect assumptions and knowledge....or a flat out "no way" before even hearing how it works - usually after hearing the words "continuous recording" on their property. Others are happy and excited to see what is going on. It seems to be an educational task and it isn't easy amidst the current privacy debates, not to mention political climate.
Please keep the board updated. I'm sure your IRB experience with acoustic monitoring deployments will be valuable to others here.
22 September 2021 7:16am
We are filming with the Australian Acoustic Observatory soon with one of the Solar BARs we created (it's continuously recording for four years!) and were wondering if recording our people chat would constitute audio vandalism? lol
Deep learning module for PAMGuard
19 August 2021 2:07pm
27 August 2021 4:32pm
Thanks heaps for the info @jamie_mac ...looks really cool and the blog is amazing too!
I dare say you might see quite a few excited responses from the community!
All the best,
Rob
1 September 2021 6:37pm
Thanks Rob! Hopefully it turns out to be a useful tool.
Just to reiterate for folk, there are links to tutorials and a beta version in the blog post.
How do I use animal-borne imaging technology in marine and terrestrial environments?
16 August 2021 12:00am
Webinar: Bioacoustics and Engagement
19 July 2021 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season 3
6 July 2021 12:00am
Kickstarter for Terra acoustic monitoring project
4 June 2021 4:09pm
GroupGets: μMoth Now Available
27 May 2021 12:00am
Tools similar to BirdNet for analyzing avian recordings?
13 May 2020 5:03pm
24 April 2021 8:50am
Almost a year since the original post, but just commenting that I've been having some pretty good success with BirdNET which has been working fine in the past few weeks I've been using it.
7 May 2021 6:51pm
Dear Thomas I'm really interested by your experience, how did you use birdnet?
I would like to monitor a area for a certain amount of time with birdnet automatically identifying the bird around, is it possible to do that? Or did you record a sound bird for a while, then transfer the audio file into bird net and manually identify each bird sound?
All the best, Antoine
11 May 2021 9:25pm
Tessa Rhinehart has developed a great compilation of bioacoustic analysis platforms, software, etc. with basic functionality on each. It's openly-available on Github -https://github.com/rhine3/audiomoth-guide/blob/master/resources/analysis-software.md.
I personally use RavenPro (from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology), Kaleidoscope (from Wildlife Acoustics), and Arbimon (from Rainforest Connection) in different capacities. I've also heard good things about PAMguard (developed firstly in the marine mammal community) and Sonic Visualizer.
BirdNET on local Windows machine?
18 September 2020 9:44am
26 October 2020 3:29pm
Got it running on Linux now.
9 May 2021 2:49pm
Dear Robin,
So what is your workflow regarding the utilisation of birdnet to analyse sound bird?
All the best,
10 May 2021 8:13am
Dear Antoine,
collect sound data (.wav) with the audiorecorder (audiomoth) of your choice.
Point the script https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET-Lite to the location of
your data storage (MicroSD) attached to the Linux machine, wait one day and see the magic happen ;-)
Greetings,
Robin
Recommendations for a waterproof microphone for bats and birds?
20 April 2021 9:01am
26 April 2021 7:30am
Thank you, Akiba! If we go down the road of constructing the outer casing ourselves, we will consider this advice! Right now we were hoping a bit more for an off the shelf model.
Cheers!
26 April 2021 11:59am
No problem. Good luck with your project :)
Akiba
7 May 2021 2:06pm
I didn't see this post until the digest came out, but if you still need some comments...
I suggest asking this question on one of the sound recordists forums. The people on [email protected] are generally quite knowledgeable on microphones and protecting them...and quite friendly :) Ivano Pelicella (Dodotronics) monitors that forum and will happy to chime in if you have a question on their mics. Or you can email him.
Regarding the Momimic...it uses the Knowles FG23629, but I see what you mean about the lack of much specs. This is their datasheet, if you don't have it - https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/knowles/FG-23629-D65/810005
The Momimic seems like a good choice for what you described and it's off the shelf, although I haven't used it personally. Maybe email Ivano for some help.
Good luck! I hope you will be posting your progress and results!
Reducing wind noise in AudioMoth recordings
23 June 2020 2:26am
23 June 2020 2:40am
Hi Daniella,
I don't know specifically about AudioMoth, but people have had very good results reducing or eliminating wind noice on things like GoPros or iPhones, etc. using simple Microphone Windscreen foam. You can buy ones for headsets and the like pretty cheap (10 for $1 for the little ones). You can just cut them up and either tape them in place on the inside of the case or rubber band them on the outside.
Also, if the sounds you are trying to extract are still audible, but hard to pull out of the noise, you might also be able to post-process the wind noise out. Wind tends to be heavy in low frequencies, so depending on what you are looking for you might be able to just filter the lower frequencies out, or use an open source tool like Audacity. But if your signal is buried deep within the noise, these tools might also corrupt your target signal.
Hope this helps.
Drue
29 June 2020 5:55pm
I second what Drue said on both fronts. Using a windscreen for any microphone is really helpful in reducing wind interference. For the Audiomoth's size, you could probably use a lavalier mic windscreen of some sort inside your case. I post-process wind interference out sometimes using bandpass filters in RavenPro (cutting out low frequencies <1kHz usually gets most of it at the site I work at) but this will depend on the frequencies of your target sounds.
28 April 2021 8:39pm
furry "dead cat" covers and blimps work best for cutting down wind noise, and a very good spectral noise repair tool, though it's paid, iZotope RX8. There is a de-wind module, but you can also teach it what to repair. I believe Davinci Resolve and Adobe Audition might also have wind reduction tools, but my go-to is iZotope RX8.
New Papers: Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation
22 April 2021 12:00am
Webinar: Mission Possible: Deployment
21 April 2021 12:00am
Webinar: Acoustic Tag Technologies and Applications
20 April 2021 12:00am
BirdCLEF 2021 Kaggle Challenge
19 April 2021 12:00am
Webinar Series
14 April 2021 1:38pm
Organize audio files by frequency
6 February 2021 3:58am
28 February 2021 12:22am
This may not be immediately useful, but I really like this interactive visualisation of bird calls organised by similarity (requires a desktop browser to run the experiment):
https://experiments.withgoogle.com/bird-sounds
They do provide the source code so it may be possible recreate this with your data, but it does seem daunting. One thing to note with these similarity measurements is the pattern or clustering is dependent on the input data. The outcome of this is you may end up with a very different order and pattern with only a sligltyly different set of input data.
18 March 2021 7:00pm
As Carlos mentioned, the R packages would be good if you're just looking for summary stats averaged over the whole 10s of the fiie. You would just read that directory into R and load seewave, tuneR, warbleR (I think monitoR may also have this functionality). Perhaps helpful links -
seewave - http://rug.mnhn.fr/seewave/
tuner - https://rdrr.io/rforge/tuneR/
warbler - https://marce10.github.io/warbleR/
9 April 2021 3:55pm
I'm assuming that by "sort by frequencies" you mean the frequency of the call itself, not the frequency of the audio recording (for example, a call at 1KHz vs a recording at a sample rate of 48KHz). My recommendation would be to use R (seewave/tuneR) to generate mean spectra of the recordings (meanspec function) and you can then use those mean spectra to figure out the peak frequency range and sort by that.
Survey Invite: Open-source acoustic monitoring technology
9 April 2021 12:00am
The 2021 #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Community Highlights
25 March 2021 12:00am
Take the survey: your needs and priorities for (open-source) acoustic monitoring technology
25 February 2021 12:45pm
22 March 2021 11:29pm
Hey everyone, only 5 DAYS LEFT to take the survey! We’re just short of 100 respondents now, and would be great to get as much coverage as possible! Please consider responding if you haven’t done so already, and spread to your contacts who might be interested.
Responses so far show a clear support for the open-source option for acoustic monitoring technology. Almost 70% would be willing to spend time or resources to learn (or have someone in their team learning) the skills that allow you to customise open-source acoustic devices. More than half thought it would be useful to have a “developer version” of an acoustic device (that you can tinker with, and integrate/connect to other devices).
Please contribute your thoughts to help the acoustic community design the open-source monitoring technology of the future!
24 March 2021 4:13am
Hi everyone, we’ve decided to extend the survey for 3 more weeks, until the 18th of April!
That will be the final date (the online survey tool we use is not free, and we’ve got budget limitations :-)
We’re now over 100 respondents from all continents, but we do have significant gaps (e.g. SE Asia and China, many parts of Africa) which we would love to cover. There is also a slight bias towards terrestrial acoustics (only 18% report working in aquatic habitats), but this might just reflect the number of people working in terrestrial vs aquatic acoustics generally. In any case, would also love to get more respondents from the wet side of life. Please participate and spread to your contacts.
And big thanks to those of you who’ve already participated!!
Advice on a Master's project
4 August 2020 2:07pm
10 March 2021 8:03pm
Yes. The key output for synchronisation is the pulse per second (PPS) output which is synchronised very accurately to UTC. The TX from the GPS module is then useful for reading the time and positions. You generally don't need to be able to send commands to the module as most of the time the default settings are fine.
10 March 2021 8:03pm
Yes. The key output for synchronisation is the pulse per second (PPS) output which is synchronised very accurately to UTC. The TX from the GPS module is then useful for reading the time and positions. You generally don't need to be able to send commands to the module as most of the time the default settings are fine.
18 March 2021 5:26pm
Hi Harry (and all)
Just wanted to share some potentially relevant papers that I've come across, in case you haven't found them already. Coming more from the ecology/conservation focused side of conservation tech, but potentially of use to see what's actually been deployed out there!
Yip, D. A., Knight, E. C., Haave‐Audet, E., Wilson, S. J., Charchuk, C., Scott, C. D., ... & Bayne, E. M. (2020). Sound level measurements from audio recordings provide objective distance estimates for distance sampling wildlife populations. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation, 6(3), 301-315. https://zslpublications.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdfdirect/10.1002/rse2.118.
Abadi, S. H., Wacker, D. W., Newton, J. G., & Flett, D. (2019). Acoustic localization of crows in pre-roost aggregations. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 146(6), 4664-4671. https://asa.scitation.org/doi/full/10.1121/1.5138133.
Spillmann, B., van Noordwijk, M. A., Willems, E. P., Mitra Setia, T., Wipfli, U., & van Schaik, C. P. (2015). Validation of an acoustic location system to monitor Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus wurmbii) long calls. American Journal of Primatology, 77(7), 767-776. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajp.22398.
Kershenbaum, A., Owens, J. L., & Waller, S. (2019). Tracking cryptic animals using acoustic multilateration: A system for long-range wolf detection. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 145(3), 1619-1628. https://doi.org/10.1121/1.5092973.
Stinco, P., Tesei, A., Dreo, R., & Micheli, M. (2021). Detection of envelope modulation and direction of arrival estimation of multiple noise sources with an acoustic vector sensor. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 149(3), 1596-1608. https://doi.org/10.1121/10.0003628.
Rhinehart, T. A., Chronister, L. M., Devlin, T., & Kitzes, J. (2020). Acoustic localization of terrestrial wildlife: Current practices and future opportunities. Ecology and Evolution, 10(13), 6794-6818. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/ece3.6216.
Funding Opportunity: COVID-19 Science Fund
10 March 2021 12:00am
Sound library for small terrestrial mammals
31 January 2021 1:42pm
12 February 2021 6:05pm
Stuart, that is really cool! Are these clips translated into audible frequency range?
12 February 2021 8:26pm
Hi Phil, the playable spectrograms have been translated into the audible frequency range (by playing in 10 x time expansion), becuase the small mammal calls are mainly above our hearing range, but a copy of the original wav files can be downloaded from the web site.
12 February 2021 9:15pm
Ah, perfect. I was wondering why I never hear those calls!
That's really nice work, thanks so much for sharing!
18 October 2021 5:41am
Our research typically involves mountainous areas within protected areas in Greece.