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Acoustic monitoring is one of our biggest and most active groups, with members collecting, analysing, and interpreting acoustic data from across species, ecosystems, and applications, from animal vocalizations to sounds from our natural and built environment

discussion

What value would you place on regular status updates from your acoustic recorder?

Frontier Labs is currently weighing up the possibility of including a 'heartbeat' function for our next iteration of our Solar BAR. What value you would place on receiving...

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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.

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.

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discussion

Arbimon terms of service

I'm currently working on trying to get my lab group to start using Arbimon, since it has some pretty cool functionality. However, in the Arbimon terms of service, I ran across...

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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

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.

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event

How do I analyze large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?

Jamie Macaulay
The recording is now available from our Tech Tutors episode with Jamie Macaulay, who answered the question, "How do I analyze large acoustic datasets using PAMGuard?" In this episode, Jamie taught us how to use the free...

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event

Bioacoustics Webinar: Creatures of the Night

Wildlife Acoustics
Join Wildlife Acoustics on October 7th at 10 AM ET/ 3 PM BST for their bioacoustics webinar, Creatures of the Night: How Sound Shines a Light on Species Active at Night. At this event, participants will learn about how...

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discussion

Incidental recording of people (in an IRB context)

I'm currently going through an IRB submission for a survey I intend to give landowners as part of an acoustic sensor deployment in upcoming months, and I'm being asked...

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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.

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

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discussion

Deep learning module for PAMGuard

Hi all We've recently been developing a new deep learning module for PAMGuard which will be released soon. For those of you unfamiliar with PAMGuard, it's an open...

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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

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.

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event

Webinar: Bioacoustics and Engagement

Wildlife Acoustics
Join Wildlife Acoustics for their webinar, Super Hear-os: Engaging Everyday People Through the Science of Bioacoustics, this Thursday, July 22nd at 10 AM ET / 3 PM BST! At this event, four presenters will discuss how...

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event

WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season 3

WILDLABS Team
The WILDLABS Tech Tutors are back for all new season of in-depth walkthroughs, deep discussions on effective, impactful, and inclusive conservation technology project strategies, and - of course- even more answers to...

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article

GroupGets: μMoth Now Available

Open Acoustic Devices
The new μMoth is now available on GroupGets! These units are going quickly, so join the order quickly to be among the first to try the world's smallest full-spectrum acoustic development board! Join the GroupGets order...

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discussion

Tools similar to BirdNet for analyzing avian recordings?

Hello everyone,  I am a new member, and this is my first post.  I am an amateur conservationist and birder, and have a love of birding (though not quite the ear to go...

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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.

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

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.

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discussion

BirdNET on local Windows machine?

Hi there, did anyone get the https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET running on a Windows machine? We get good results online and would love to run it locally. Greetings from Vienna...

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Dear Robin,

 

So what is your workflow regarding the utilisation of birdnet to analyse sound bird?

 

All the best,

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

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discussion

Recommendations for a waterproof microphone for bats and birds?

Hey all. I'm drawing up the specs for an at-sea recorder, geared towards recording migratory bats and birds. We're going to likely be using some of the Wildlife Acoustics...

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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!

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discussion

Reducing wind noise in AudioMoth recordings

Hi everyone. I'm wondering if anyone has tips for reducing wind noise in AudioMoth recordings. Our study sites are open paddocks and can be subject to high wind. Many...

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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

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. 

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. 

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article

New Papers: Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation

Remote Sensing in Ecology & Conservation
ZSL's Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation journal  has released new research for early view before inclusion in an issue. See the full list of recent open access research papers on RSEC.

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event

Webinar: Mission Possible: Deployment

Wildlife Acoustics
Join Wildlife Acoustics for a free webinar, "Misson Possible: Deployment," on May 13th from 10:00 AM - 2:00 PM US EDT/ 3:00 PM -7:00 PM BST. This webinar's expert panel will focus on deployment methods, procedures, and...

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event

Webinar: Acoustic Tag Technologies and Applications

The Discovery of Sound in the Sea
Join the DOSITS 2021 Webinar Series on Friday, May 7, 2021 12:00 PM ET for their upcoming session, "Acoustic Tag Technologies and Applications." This webinar will feature presentations from two marine bioacoustics...

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event

BirdCLEF 2021 Kaggle Challenge

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Join the BirdCLEF 2021 Kaggle challenge, where you’ll automate the acoustic identification of birds in soundscape recordings. You'll examine an acoustic dataset to build detectors and classifiers to extract the signals...

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discussion

Webinar Series

Hi all, The UK Acoustics Network's Bioacoustics special interest group is hosting a monthly webinar series starting this month (April) with talks on ecoacoustics, ...

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discussion

Organize audio files by frequency

Hi! I hope everyone is doing well. I am new to acoustic tracking and I have recently set out an audio recorder to record bird sounds and I now have 100s of files of 10-...

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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.

 

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/

 

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.

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article

Survey Invite: Open-source acoustic monitoring technology

University of Melbourne
The University of Melbourne and Open Acoustic Devices  are conducting an online survey to understand the future needs of open-source acoustic monitoring technology applied to the study of biodiversity. The results of...

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discussion

Take the survey: your needs and priorities for (open-source) acoustic monitoring technology

Hi everyone, Experienced or a newbie with acoustic monitoring? Doesn’t matter, we want to hear from you! We want to know your wish list for acoustic monitoring technology....

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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!

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!!

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discussion

Advice on a Master's project

Hi all, I’m posting here to ask for a some advice. Sorry in advance for the long post. I’m currently studying for an integrated masters in Electrical and...

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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.

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.

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.

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funding

Funding Opportunity: COVID-19 Science Fund

National Geographic
National Geographic is offering funding up to up to $50,000 for conservationists conducting research on how the pandemic has impacted wildlife and conservation work.  If you are interested in researching aspects of the...

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discussion

Sound library for small terrestrial mammals

Accompanying an article in British Wildlife describing the sound identification of small terrestrial mammals in the UK, colleagues and I at the BTO have put together a sound...

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Stuart, that is really cool! Are these clips translated into audible frequency range?

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.

 

Ah, perfect. I was wondering why I never hear those calls!

That's really nice work, thanks so much for sharing!

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