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
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Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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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... |
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Acoustics | 2 years 7 months ago | |
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... |
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Acoustics | 2 years 7 months ago | |
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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Acoustics | 2 years 8 months ago | |
This is a small device that sits in your backyard and monitors sounds and RF signals for wildlife. https://www.kickstarter.com/... |
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Acoustics | 2 years 11 months ago | |
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://... |
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Acoustics | 3 years ago | |
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... |
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Acoustics | 3 years ago | |
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... |
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Acoustics | 3 years ago | |
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-... |
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Acoustics | 3 years ago | |
Hi all, The UK Acoustics Network's Bioacoustics special interest group is hosting a monthly webinar series starting this month (... |
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Acoustics | 3 years 1 month ago | |
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... |
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Acoustics | 3 years 1 month ago | |
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,... |
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Acoustics | 3 years 1 month ago | |
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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Acoustics | 3 years 3 months ago |
EarthHz tool
29 January 2021 3:39pm
warbleR / R packages for bioacoustics forum
2 December 2020 11:45am
20 December 2020 2:10am
I used the package soundecology in R: URL: http://ljvillanueva.github.io/soundecology/ and https://cran.r-project.org/package=soundecology
This package helps to calculate several acoustic index using .WAV files. Is possible to analyses several files as same time.
Best regards!
17 January 2021 6:44pm
Hi all thanks for the answers!
Carly - thanks, will have to try yours. I did the course at the Organisation of Tropical Studies with Marcelo, which was awesome, but this is not something he's keen on answering, I think he has other ways of doing it. Sorting it out on Github atm. Hope your moving terabytes of data is going well :)
domingos - thank you, I do know about this one, but having a selection table in warbleR opens up to a lot of various other options that can be really useful. Will keep you updated.
Thanks
Axel
Workshop: Analyses of acoustic telemetry data with R
15 January 2021 12:00am
Analyzing sounds of flying insects
17 December 2020 2:08pm
18 December 2020 6:14pm
this guys has been around a long and has some neat stuff http://songsofinsects.com/about
but sure looks like a wide-open area of research ...
4 January 2021 12:26pm
Tom Dally at Leeds University UK is doing work in this area. I dont think he has anything published yet but his preliminary results are interesting (saw them at a workshop).
https://biologicalsciences.leeds.ac.uk/school-of-biology/pgr/753/thomas-dally
Tom
Tech Tutors: How do I use pattern matching analysis to label acoustic data with RFCxArbimon?
17 December 2020 3:31pm
17 December 2020 9:22pm
Thanks everybody for joining today's session! I've attached the article here that describes Pattern Matching in greater detail to respond to some of the questions from today's session.
Also, here is a link to our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service for the individual who had questions about GDPR. Feel free to contact us at [email protected] with any other questions about the platform or Pattern Matching in general!
23 December 2020 3:21am
Zephyr and Marconi, thanks for the great talk and your hard work that made this platform available to the public!! I'm experimenting with the pattern matching function to create some training data but have issues trying to get the "Jobs'' to run. I only have 18 files for each of these tests, but only 1 processed to 11.1% while two others stay at 0%. The internet connection was briefly interrupted when I created the first job and was fine later on. I can only Hide, not delete or re-run these jobs, so I'm not sure what to do. Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks so much!
23 December 2020 3:27pm
Hi @pmnguyen1224 , thanks for reaching out and checking out the system! We would love to help ensure that you're able to get pattern matching to work for you! I do have a few questions for you so we can replicate issue you are experiencing. Would you mind emailing us a couple screenshots and your original message above at [email protected] to get started? Or feel free to send us a chat if that's easier, by clicking on the chat icon on https://arbimon.rfcx.org/. Looking forward to supporting you moving forward!
How do I use pattern matching analysis to label acoustic data with RFCx Arbimon?
8 December 2020 12:00am
FIS Call for Expressions of Interest (closed)
8 December 2020 12:00am
Calling all hydrophone users: Tell us what you want!
26 November 2020 10:52am
6 December 2020 5:50pm
I’ll stick some thoughts here that other folk can maybe comment on/add to.
So there are a few (obvious) differences between terrestrial and marine acoustics.
- Devices are immersed in a highly corrosive and conductive liquid (sea water) with strong underwater currents, fishermen, storms etc.
- Boat’s are usually required to deploy devices - that can mean it is much more expensive to make recordings.
- Ultra high frequency species and noise sources (e.g. harbour porpoise @130kHz and broadband delphinid clicks @ >200kHz and echo sounders @ 200kHz) are relatively common.
For PAM devices that means a few things:
- Longevity is crucial because it can greatly decrease the cost per hour of recordings (less boat time is required). There are a few strategies for maximising this;
- Devices such as FPODs and SoundTraps run onboard detectors. The SoundTrap in particular can run a click detector at high frequency (up to 576khz sample rate) whilst also contiously recording at lower sample rates. This means that it detects high frequency delphinid and porpoise clicks (and saves the waveform for further analysis) and at the same time records all lower frequency sounds where almost all of the complex tonal vocalisations of dolphins, baleen whales and anthropogenic sounds occur; these types of sounds also happen to be more difficult to accurately automatically detect (especially on low powered hardware). This strategy results in an order of magnitude reduction in data without incurring a large cost in data degradation.
- Run on board compression algorithms - the SoundTrap uses an open source X3 compression algorithm that often results in four times lossless data compression.
- Have the space for a lot of batteries and/or the option of an external battery pack.
- Sensitivity is important because you want to maximise your monitored area (again making your survey as efficient as possible). That means choosing a hydrophone, amplifier and DAQ with a low noise floor and appropriate clip level.
- Devices must be robust and waterproof. They should be able to survive biofouling, getting knocked on the seabed and ending up in a fishing net etc. The two common housing designs are to have a completely sealed unit with an underwater connector (often SubConn) for downloading data or having a unit which can be opened to remove memory cards and batteries. Both approaches have their advantages and failure points. For example, devices which are sealed tend to be more simple to set up but the connector is often a failure point. Devices which can be opened are serviceable at sea but they can flood and are air filled which makes them a bigger acoustic target for echolocators (and so can mess up results).
There are also a few ‘nice to have’ options.
- Two sample synchronised hydrophones allowing a bearing to be calculated. This can be useful for a whole host of stuff - for example using bearing tracks to figure out how many animals might be present, improving density estimation methods and allowing an extra data dimension for classification algorithms. It also means the devices are useful for a host of other applications - e.g. towed hydrophone surveys.
- Depth, temperature, tilt and light sensors are inexpensive low power and produce only a few gigabytes (at the very most) of data over a survey but can provide a wealth of oceanographic data that is also helpful in acoustic monitoring.
- If running detectors, then recording noise is critical because it allows us to model changes in the probability of detecting animals which is often important in density estimation.
- Accurate clocks are useful. The SoundTrap clock drifts around 2s per day. Although manageable, this is often a pain and consumes valuable analysis time re-syncing devices together.
- The ability to daisy chain devices so they can be sample synchronised and used in acoustic arrays is very handy. For example SoundTraps have been used to make large aperture hydrophone arrays to localise Kogia. DOI: 10.1016/j.dsr.2020.103233 (if achievable this may supersede point 1. )
Ok, that’s everything I can think of for now. I would be keen to hear other opinions on this, additions, disagreements etc. Jamie
Making the Most of Tech Tutors Season 2!
30 November 2020 12:00am
Kaggle Competition: Species Audio Detection
24 November 2020 12:00am
WILDLABS Tech Tutors: Season Two
24 November 2020 12:00am
Weekly Event: OTN Virtual Study Hall
16 November 2020 12:00am
Hackathon Opportunity: Vaquita Hacks
10 November 2020 12:00am
Funding Opportunity: Wildlife Acoustics Scientific Product Grants
6 November 2020 12:00am
RSEC Journal: Ecoacoustics and Biodiversity Monitoring
28 October 2020 12:00am
Looking for a collaborator with CNN/app development experience
22 October 2020 3:09pm
22 October 2020 8:14pm
Hi Sophia,
Just wondering what 'collaborate' means here - are you looking for a volunteer on the project or do you have budget to support the project?
Steph
23 October 2020 2:24pm
Hi Steph! It could be either - if there was anyone out there for whom this work would be a good fit for their current role, then that would be easy, but if they needed their time paying for then I have extra funds I can apply for, which I would feel fairly confident about.
Distinguishing Noise from Sounds - a question of recognition?
23 September 2020 4:39pm
26 September 2020 2:04pm
Thanks Nick,
In discussion here this issue of unknown classifications may be a widespread problem for supervised learning models? A colleague PhD candidate here is working on sound classification and mentioned the self same problem today. For example, "Cat", "Dog", "Everything else"? Is the "Everything else" state space (much) bigger than the two classifying state spaces?
One suggestion has been to take very small slices of "Squawk" of the flock of birds and use a distinct slice of frequencies from the spectrum thereof?
A problem remains however: how distinct is the combined squawk of a Quelea bird from other flocks of small birds?
Any advice on how to build specific classifiers would be most helpful?
Many thanks,
Andrew.
9 October 2020 12:14pm
It sounds like you are referring to what is often called the "Cocktail Party" problem. There has been quite a bit of research in this area, but it is a very hard problem. I would start with the general literature on this topic as there isn't much in the conservation space. Check the hearing aid literature....picking out someone talking in a crowd of voices and sounds. Humans are pretty amazing at this...machines not so much. You might consider following up on some recent research at MIT:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/08/28/music-youtube-cocktail-party-problem-ai-artificial-intelligence-deep-learning/
For what its worth, it's a fascinating problem and has a lot of conservation applications. As Nick mentioned, the biggest challenge is getting enough usable soundscapes.
9 October 2020 2:54pm
Hi cosmicspittle,
Many thanks for the pointer, I shall discusss it with our local tech disussion group here tomorrow morning. One of the guy's, the PhD candidate in tehrapy audio analysis, will be most ineterested as well. Our project is indeed becoming ever more interesting, like an onion, peeling away layers of complexity. The key difference using our DSP methodology is that the spctrum has few if any harmonic cycles to identify, being of a low deviation level at a thin range of dB acros sht ewhole specturm. Thus each frequeny is much like th elast, giving no pattern to cross-correlate. At this stage we do not think machine learning will give us much either without some way of getting a pattern to match somewhere? One suggestion has been to take a series of very thin slices of frequencies when we know the squeak occurs using audacity as our source range, but as I say, the y-xis dB for every frequncy deviates very little, hence it is just "squelch"?
I hope to gain something from the research you mention, many thanks.
All the best,
Andrew.
Training Opportunity: HarvardX TinyML Course
30 September 2020 12:00am
Webinar: Advances in Fisheries Electronic Monitoring
21 September 2020 12:00am
Amphibians and Acoustic Enrichment in Wildlife Passages
14 September 2020 11:18pm
Hackaday - Identifying Creatures That Go Chirp In The Night
11 September 2020 11:13am
Meet the Scientists of Black Mammalogists Week!
10 September 2020 12:00am
Tech Tutors: Review Session
3 September 2020 12:00am
African Bioacoustics Community Conference
28 August 2020 12:00am
Sustainable Fishing Challenges: Fishing Gear Innovations
19 August 2020 12:00am
Challenge: ElephantEdge
11 August 2020 12:00am
AudioMoth Water Resistant Case Design
26 July 2018 8:16am
22 August 2019 6:50pm
Hi, do you still have some left overs of hyrdrophobic cloth? I'm currently in Mexico but a friend of mine is in UK so she can bring them to me. Thank you so much.
23 August 2019 8:21am
Hi - I'm down to three sheets - the usable area is 12cm by 12 cm - I did post some cloth to the US and the total price was under $5USD which I think would be 80-100 Peso but equally happy to send to your friend. Email me [email protected] and we can sort out fine details - one thing is I'm away from home till early september. so couldn't send till then and the UK-Mexico post take about 5 days. Best Wishes - David Brown
10 August 2020 10:23pm
Hello to you all, I hope everyone is doing ok during this Covid-19 contingency.
Jsut sharing this adaptation for the water proof case for the Audio Moth.
https://www.tetrixecology.com/single-post/Developing-an-Enclosure-for-the-AudioMoth-Acoustic-Logger---Part-1
How do I build bespoke conservation technology?
20 July 2020 12:00am
Help with analysing bat recordings from Audiomoth
24 June 2020 12:47pm
9 July 2020 4:39pm
Johnnie, Hope you got on OK. If you need some data analysing I could help out if needed? Let me know on here - or email me a WeTransfer with some wav files?
Thanks, Carlos
14 July 2020 5:20pm
Hi Carlos
Thank you for your message. I would quite like to send you some files. What's the best email address to send them to?
Thanks
Johnnie
15 July 2020 11:08am
Tech Tutors: How do I scale up acoustic surveys with Audiomoths and automated processing?
8 July 2020 10:33pm
9 July 2020 6:11pm
Hi everyone,
Thanks for attending today's episode! You can find all of the collaborative notes at the link below, and we also encourage you to use this thread to connect and collaborate with the people you met in the chat.
https://notes.datawrapper.de/p/Tech_Tutors_Episode_4
We'll be posting the video and slides here tomorrow.
And as always, please use this thread to ask any follow-up questions you have for Tessa and the acoustic monitoring community!
-Ellie
4 December 2020 3:21pm
Hi all!
Just as a general resource, @tessa.rhinehart has a really awesome table of different bioacoustic software and R packages with their varied functionality: https://github.com/rhine3/audiomoth-guide/blob/master/resources/analysis-software.md.
I haven't worked with warbleR directly, but I've played around in monitoR and gibbonR for passive acoustic monitoring analyses.
You might also just reach out to Marcelo (writer of the package) and ask directly...
Happy coding!
Carly