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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Wild Spy
Whilst I love everything about WILDLABS and the conservation tech community I am mostly here for the badges!!
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Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH
data scientist/algorithmic dev - caught fire for movement ecology
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I am a zoologist and I am interested in biodiversity and the conservation of insects and mammals
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Ecologist
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Lead, San Diego Zoo Conservation Technology Lab
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National Scientific and Technical Research Council of Argentina (CONICET)
Herpetologist and conservationist, focused on the conservation of the endemic and threatened amphibian species of NW Argentina.
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Ocean Science Analytics
Marine mammal ecologist and online technical trainer
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University of Cambridge & Imperial College London
Interdisciplinary scientist working in field data collection methods and tropical agriculture
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I am a Senior researcher and PI in Conservation and Animal Ecology at Fondazione Edmund Mach, Trento, Italy. I am coordinator of EUROMAMMALS, member of the advisory board of the Global Initiative on Ungulate Migration at CMS, and President of the International Bio-Logging Society
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Mystic Aquarium is seeking a Postdoctoral Investigator (PDI) to address noise impacts on aquatic species, particularly beluga whales, seals and turtles. This project will develop & carry out research to address...
1 September 2022
Seeking interested individuals with qualifications and educational background and experience in marine species biology/ecology (marine mammals, sea turtles, fish, seabirds, etc.); with skills in applied scientific study...
31 August 2022
Marine Acoustics, Inc. (MAI) is seeking an Acoustic Modeler and Analyst to assist us in the analysis of underwater acoustic system performance and the effect underwater acoustic transmissions have on the marine...
30 August 2022
Boost cons tech capacity at an international NGO! Fauna & Flora International is offering a paid three-month internship to consolidate and share best practices for the application of emerging hardware and software...
26 August 2022
Article
An update on Ceres Tags products that are being used in conservation
22 August 2022
Funding
Wildlife Acoustics' grant program to receive bioacoustic tools and software is now accepting applications. Apply for up to $4,000 worth of products and software licenses.
9 August 2022
Gavin Jones is seeking a postdoctoral researcher to join his movemebt ecology and bioacoustics work focusing on spotted owls.
4 August 2022
The Earth Species Project (ESP) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to decoding animal communication and translating non-human language.
15 July 2022
PAM & transfer learning, defining occupancy in surveys, effects of anthropogenic noise on fish, soundscapes to track ecosystem recovery, detecting sharks with echosounders, using PAMGuard to detect marine mammals
21 June 2022
The Sound and Light Ecology Team, a collaboration between Colorado State University and National Park Service scientists, is hiring an acoustic ecology postdoctoral fellow in Fort Collins, CO.
16 June 2022
Rainforest Connection has multiple engineering positions that will suppor their work developing acoustic monitoring devices.
16 June 2022
Video recording of workshop held in Madagascar + PDFs of slide, links to other resources & terrestrial PAM bibliography
13 June 2022
June 2024
July 2024
event
September 2024
event
December 2023
event
November 2023
event
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Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hi Bhavesh - thanks a lot. WildLabs doesn't allow me to upload .wav files - can I email you or get them to you another way? They are small - 2 seconds each. You... |
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Acoustics | 7 years 1 month ago | |
sorry, double entry |
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Acoustics | 7 years 6 months ago | |
Hello Courtney My turn to apologies for delay. Your study sounds very interesting and potentially a valuable technique for future in-situ research. Seems it could indeed fit... |
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Acoustics | 7 years 8 months ago | |
Great survey idea, Rory! I am completing it for my organization now so you should see another form input shortly. |
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Acoustics | 7 years 9 months ago | |
For those who are interested in this thread, Arik has posted his new prototype in a new thread, where the discussion has continued. |
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Acoustics | 7 years 10 months ago | |
Hi Tiago, Thank you for sharing this paper and contributing your experience to the thread. Blantant self promotion, as you put it, is more than welcome when the work... |
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Acoustics | 8 years ago | |
The Elephant Listening Project at the University of Cornell is looking a Postdoctoral research to study forest elephants in central Africa using a combination of field... |
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Acoustics | 8 years 2 months ago | |
Like many scientists, I am addicted to learning as much information about my field as possible. That being said - does anyone have any... |
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Acoustics | 8 years 3 months ago | |
Excerpted from an article available via Alberta Farm Press (opens in new window). "A University of Alberta... |
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Acoustics | 8 years 3 months ago | |
This special issue of Ecological Informatics, entitled Ecological Acoustics, is a great overview of the applicatoins of acoustic... |
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Acoustics | 8 years 4 months ago |
In case you missed it... (no. 1)
12 September 2023 11:49am
13 September 2023 6:23am
EcoHacK 2023
unsupervised machine learning to infer syntax and temporal organisations of animal vocalizations
7 September 2023 3:02pm
CIEEM 2023 Autumn Conference: Modernising Ecology: Techniques and Approaches
5 September 2023 1:59pm
Audiomoth online conference
5 September 2023 11:46am
24 October 2023 7:18pm
Large scale bioacoustic analysis in the Peruvian Amazon
1 September 2023 1:49pm
It's relatively easy to collect vast amounts of audio data - it's not so easy to analyse it and get consistent results. The Wilder Sensing platform enables users to upload vast quantities of audio which is then analysed using ML models such as BirdNET - read Auroras story.
Estimating California Spotted Owl population with bioacoustic survey
29 August 2023 1:55am
News about a population survey of California Spotted Owls using 1,600 autonomous recording units in the Sierra Nevada region. Machine learning made analyzing this acoustic data possible at this large scale for the first time.
Presentation opportunity for Audiomoth users - RSVP ASAP!
24 August 2023 11:44pm
Reviewing Now: Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellowship
24 August 2023 11:09pm
Building a new recording device for sound localization
20 June 2023 11:57am
12 August 2023 10:26am
Thanks! Yes, I'm using the libraries from opensoundscape and it was Tessa who pointed me to wildlabs :) I'll publish the source code to the sound capture code this weekend in github with minimal instructions on configuring the rest of the OS till I get time to write an article about it which won't be till I've built 5x articles and done a convincing field test for a motivating article. Note, although I learnt how to configure the time synchronization with PPS from other articles on the net some steps were missed out that were vital to getting a fast and good sync, I'll be publishing these. Specifically, the start order of the gps versus chrony needs to be reversed from the default otherwise the PPS signal is not being communicated via shared memory to chrony which ruins the convergence to accurate time. Along with allowing the chrony time server daemon to step the clock so long as the alignment has > 1 ms of difference.
Simulations with opensoundscape suggest really, really good accuracy with the soundfinder algorithm is possible. When we get closer to new years eve I'll get really good test data from all the illegal fireworks that get set off here.
Once the capture side of things is sorted I'll move on to finding a good inference algorithm that performs well on the raspberry pi and then to working on a central server to correlate all of this automatically with the goal to making something that sends out an alert to a google maps link as to the location of the source, that will be fun :)
Oh and actually, I have to finish the install code for my other project that links computer vision algorithms to a state management and alerting system. This runs on jetson series SBCs. I've ported it all to the new Jetson Orin series computers but haven't yet finished writing the install code because I got distracted with this project about 4 months ago. The computer vision alerting state machine thing is here, and it's also useful in the fight against poachers. The new Orin series from nvidia allow the highest scoring open source computer vision algorithms (based on the microsoft coco dataset) to be integrated, such as yolov6, which results in significantly less false positives. And the state management facilities of my app provide you with a large amount of flexibility to reduce this even further.
13 August 2023 3:28pm
As promised, I've pushed the code to github today, the URL is:
Note, this is somewhat of a premature announcement (to keep my promise) because I still need to add a bunch of documentation and how to install the prerequisites, recommended way of deploying etc.
However, for the curious, it is a very simple program. And so long as you install jackd2 and the prerequisites to the build script (./build.sh) it will run on whatever system you have and accurately align the sound files to the system time, along with the tracking file.
Much of the work surrounding this project was working out how to setup the GPS synced system time correctly. There are several guides on how to do this, however, when I tried to run this on a system that was disconnected from the network I found that there were important steps omitted in the guides that were needed to provide fast and accurate syncing in the absence of any network. I'll be adding these steps to this repository over time and write up a nice article about it once I've done the field tests. With the changes I made when installing the time sync changes the current system will sync to sub microsecond accuracy within a minute from when 5 satellites are locked.
24 August 2023 12:52pm
I've tested a Petterson ultrasonic microphone with a sample rate of 384khz and it works out of the box with this software as well. Would be cool to sound localize some bats.
RFCx/Arbimon is hiring a Quantitative Ecologist!
11 August 2023 11:50pm
Acoustic Monitoring and AI to Recognize Elephant Sounds & Gunshots
9 August 2023 11:11pm
This article discusses Cornell's bioacoustics work with AI tools to recognize both elephant "voices" as well as gunshots. The elephant rumbles analyzed in this work are almost imperceptible to the human ear, but can be clearly detected with technology.
#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees
4 August 2023 10:00am
European Forum Alpbach
1 August 2023 5:23pm
Senior Technical Specialist, Monitoring & Technology, ZSL
18 July 2023 1:44pm
New Updates to Carbon Mapper Data Portal
12 July 2023 4:57pm
WOPAM Day (World Oceans Passive Acoustic Monitoring Day)
12 July 2023 4:04pm
LABMaker
6 June 2023 3:31pm
8 June 2023 1:59am
GroupGets?
17 June 2023 10:36am
Dear Tom, the AudioMoths are being sold via LabMakers (but I do not know if they construct them for them). Have you been in touch with the AudioMoth team? I am sure they will be able to provide you useful feedback regarding what you are trying to do, and LabMakers.
I have only used them to buy things from them.
Regards, Christos
3 July 2023 4:00pm
Hi Tom,
Seeed Studio also offers manufacturing services. Check out more info on the website here :)
RFCx/Arbimon is Hiring a Data Scientist!
28 June 2023 9:37pm
Bat Identification Tools Comparison
16 May 2023 3:32pm
19 May 2023 12:38pm
The BTO Acoustic Pipeline is free to use up to 100 GB / year (about 50 nights of triggered bat recording). I am not un-biased to comment on performance because I built the classifiers that are used by the Pipeline, but I would strongly recommend that you take a dataset (with everything - not just pulling out the best bat recordings) that you have taken time to manually check, put it through each option that you are considering, and critically compare the performance.
In particular, the largest differences in performance between a good and more poorly performance classifier will be for some of the more cryptic species, so particularly focus on e.g. Myotis species, Plecotus species - if you are in an area where Brown and Grey long-eared bat are present. See how well the approach is able to identify multiple species if present in a wav file - is the classifier just identifying the species with the strongest calls, how well does it identify bat social calls / e.g. is it mis-identifying Pipistrellus social calls as Nyctalus species , how well does it identify weak bat calls in noisy recordings (e.g. does it miss Barbastelle calls in recordings with bush-crickets), does it mis-identify small mammals calls as bats e.g. Brown rat calls as Nyctalus species.
8 June 2023 1:38pm
Hi Stuart, Thanks for your response, and nice to e-meet someone behind the BTO acoustic pipeline! I have been testing out BTO quite a lot recently, and have started comparing results to Kaleidoscope this month, and have been manually checking classification results against raw audio. Will keep you updated with any findings if of interest.
Is there a minimum frequency recording that needs to be taken when uploading the BTO acoustic pipeline? I'm also interested in small mammals, and suspect that 96 KHz should be fine, rather than 192/384 when recording for bats.
22 June 2023 6:57pm
Another option for you could be Arbimon - it's free and does not require any coding/programming knowledge!
The Wildlife Society Conference
19 June 2023 5:59am
Catch up with The Variety Hour: June 2023
16 June 2023 11:43am
Wildlife Monitoring Engineer
8 June 2023 4:54pm
ISO Speakers for Emerging Technologies class.
31 May 2023 4:29pm
31 May 2023 10:21pm
Definitely interested! I'm in the ecoacoustics/acoustic monitoring space, working at Rainforest Connection and Arbimon.
2 June 2023 2:08pm
Carly, that would be great! Thanks! I work with soundscapes and love the work of Rainforest Connection! I'll send you an email (@CUNY) to coordinate!
Frontier Labs BAR-LT Localization Firmware
19 May 2023 11:12pm
2 June 2023 1:46pm
Hi @tessa_rhinehart
Apologies, only just saw this message. Did you end up getting the firmware. I know the Frontier Lab guys and can possibly reach out to them if you are still having trouble. Let me know.
Cheers,
Rob
Funding Opportunity for attending bird-focused events and trainings
2 June 2023 12:54am
Looking for AI volunteer positions
24 May 2023 5:41am
24 May 2023 3:45pm
Hi Donya! You might check out the Conservation Tech Directory to see what projects/organizations/tools best align with your interests and skills.
14 September 2023 6:28pm