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
Baker Consultants has released new ecoacoustic research assessing the benefits of using automated detectors alongside transect bird survey methods.
30 October 2023
Article
Five #tech4wildlife people, projects and updates that caught my attention this month. This issue is a naturetech, biodiversity startup edition! Featuring a living map of the biodiversity startup scene, is nature data...
27 October 2023
Careers
The Institute for Bird Populations (IBP) seeks a California-based acoustic monitoring specialist to collect, manage, and process avian acoustic data from multiple research and conservation projects across California...
26 October 2023
With the rising threats to biodiversity such as wildlife crime, climate change and human-wildlife conflict today, wildlife monitoring technologies have become vital to study movement ecology, behaviour patterns, changes...
25 October 2023
To study song evolution in time and space, we will use individual acoustic monitoring (IAM) - a non-invasive method that allows the identification of individuals based solely on their vocalisations. In this project, we...
20 October 2023
The Marie Skłodowska-Curie PhD Fellowship in Bioacoustic AI for wildlife protection. The PhD position advertised here will be based at the KU Leuven Electrical Engineering Department (ESAT), under the supervision of...
20 October 2023
FLOATERS: Using individually distinct vocalizations to estimate breeding and non-breeding population of a species. Apply for the fully funded PhD position now!
20 October 2023
The Kitzes Lab at the University of Pittsburgh (http://kitzeslab.org) is seeking applications for a Postdoctoral Scholar, Research Assistant, and Graduate Student to work in the areas of bioacoustics, quantitative...
28 September 2023
Careers
Island Conservation's Innovation Team is dedicated to developing innovative, data-driven tools to increase the scale, scope, and pace of island restorations around the world. As the Conservation Innovation Manager, you...
27 September 2023
If only there was a place where these users, manufacturers, and supporters of conservation technology could connect with one another. There is. It is called WILDLABS.
22 September 2023
The new white paper from Rainforest Connection (RFCx) explores the power of ecoacoustics and AI to monitor biodiversity and track progress towards GBF targets using case studies from around the world.
20 September 2023
Article
Five #tech4wildlife people, projects and updates that caught our attention this month. An AI supported bear early warning system, a project that's connecting indigenous communities with high speed internet, exploring...
12 September 2023
June 2024
July 2024
event
September 2024
event
November 2023
event
The 59th Annual Meeting of Illinois Chapter of The Wildlife Society
12 April 2023 5:24am
Accessible acoustic analysis tech for blind scientist - ideas?
31 March 2023 10:52pm
7 April 2023 1:40am
Hi Kate,
We've developed a screen-reader workflow for a classification problem on our "Ocean Voices" Zooniverse project, which simply asks folks to label sounds based on what they hear and omits the spectrogram altogether. There are lots of screen-reader users who are active in the Zooniverse Talk forums, so they may have valuable input for you as well.
Once a person has labeled data, I wonder if they could run automated detectors over the data in Pamguard, calculate features (using something like the R package PAMpal), and then use the BrailleR package to explore the statistics in R. This article has a pretty interesting summary about statistical software for visually impaired folks - might not be news to your student, but I thought it was pretty cool.
I'm very curious what our friends who are visually impaired might notice in the acoustic data. Best of luck to you and your student!
Cheers,
Anne
7 April 2023 5:11pm
Hi Kate- ARISTA Lab (Advanced Research in Inclusion & STEAM Accessibility) is actively working on this through their eclispse soundscape project. I recommend reaching out to MaryKay to get the latest on their project.
Megan
Who's going to ESA in Portland this year?
31 March 2023 9:27am
4 April 2023 9:58am
That sounds great. I think you should encourage people to bring a bit of tech with them, can be a good conversation starter/ice-breaker
4 April 2023 4:04pm
Good idea! I've got a ransom assortment of different acoustic recorders I can bring along
5 April 2023 11:58pm
Indeed, I'll be there too! I like to meet new conservation friends with morning runs, so I will likely organize a couple of runs, maybe one right near the conference, and one somewhere in a nearby park where we can look for wildlife. The latter would probably be at an obscenely early hour, so we can drive somewhere, ideally see elk (there are elk within 25 minutes of Portland!), and still get back in time for the morning sessions.
Updates about Arbimon for Ecoacoustics - free, cloud based analytical tool
31 March 2023 11:09am
31 March 2023 3:43pm
Yes please reach out with any questions on acoustic monitoring, Arbimon, RFCx, etc.!
The WILDLABS Variety Hour: March 2023 - YouTube
30 March 2023 4:04pm
If you missed our Variety Hour show yesterday, do not fear! It's already live on youtube for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy!
Global shortage of Raspberry Pis - What are the alternatives
3 November 2022 10:27am
28 March 2023 9:37pm
Have you considered Arduinos?
29 March 2023 10:13am
UPDATE: The Banana Pi didnt work out for us as it was not possible to track back all the components and ensure that they were responsibly sourced. The Rock board did work for us and we were able to port our system onto this. We will be rolling out units using this over the summer. It also looks like Raspberry Pis are coming back on line and we were able to secure a bulk order for deliver mid-summer
29 March 2023 10:14am
Yes, but for our needs that are not powerful enough
Exploring storage options for mass data collection
22 March 2023 3:20am
22 March 2023 7:36pm
Hi Adam!
I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.
I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.
27 March 2023 5:23am
Alex Rogers: Acoustic Devices for Biodiversity Monitoring — Smart Forests Atlas
24 March 2023 12:28pm
In this radio episode, we speak to Alex Rogers, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. We discuss how Alex's research team developed the acoustic recording device AudioMoth, how low-cost technologies can democratise biodiversity monitoring, and how sensing technologies can lead to certain species and environments being monitored more than others.
Interviewers: Max Ritts and Michelle Westerlaken
Producer: Harry Murdoch
Catch up with The Variety Hour: March 2023
23 March 2023 11:09am
Using acoustic monitoring to track infectious disease risk
8 March 2023 1:29pm
Proposals wanted for Innovation in Practice
6 March 2023 10:34pm
USD500 available for your workshop
6 March 2023 1:30pm
AudioMoth and Song Meter Micro battery life tests
16 February 2023 4:09pm
24 February 2023 2:20pm
Hi Justin, looks like the link is not working!
24 February 2023 5:23pm
Should work now - a stray full stop snuck in there!
26 February 2023 2:58pm
Hi Justin,
Dropping in a question you've received over on twitter:
@KitzesLab Did you try comparing different SD card sizes to check if that influenced battery life?
— Lucille Chapuis (@sharkslikejazz) February 26, 2023
Hi! Nope, this report doesn't test SD card size or any other parameters like read/write speed or brand.
— Tessa Rhinehart (@TessaRhinehart) March 7, 2023
Use of passive acoustic monitoring methods to estimate poaching pressure of European turtle doves in Greece (Ionian Islands)
24 February 2023 12:54pm
The Arbimon newsletter is back!
23 February 2023 11:34pm
New guidance - Good practice for ecoacoustic monitoring
23 February 2023 10:31am
Acoustic monitoring fieldwork positions in Puerto Rico
22 February 2023 2:41pm
Texas Chapter of The Wildlife Society’s Annual Meeting 2023
20 February 2023 10:56pm
Research Assistants in Kitzes Lab
16 February 2023 4:12pm
Developing Two Non-invasive Survey Methods for Freshwater Ecosystems: Environmental DNA and Ecoacoustics
10 February 2023 10:41am
Interesting PhD thesis just shared via ResearchGate, looking at developing eDNA and bioacoustics to 1) detect invasive/endangered crayfish & identify rivers vulnerable to invasion, and 2) Describe pond soundscape ecology/phenology, & provide guidelines for survey design.
Swift Software Developer - Lab of Ornithology
10 February 2023 10:38am
Research Associate - Machine Learning (Underwater Sound)
10 February 2023 10:19am
Cleaning audiomoth circuit board
17 January 2023 11:42am
28 January 2023 5:40am
I'd also add that if the boards are just dirty or dusty, you can just remove all batteries, then wash with a toothbrush and water. Air dry (or use compressed air which speeds things up greatly) and then spot clean areas that need solvent with isopropanol as Harold mentioned. Also if you don't have access to conformal coating, you can also use a non-conductive clear lacquer. The conformal coating covers all the components and prevents short circuits due to conductive water (ie: salt water) or other contaminants. However if you do use a conformal coating, make sure all cables are connected first and the device is in the exact state that it will be deployed in. Also don't conformal coat the battery connectors since you'll want to change out batteries periodically.
2 February 2023 8:13am
Hi Akiba,
thanks for your this great advice! I used the conformal coating on parts
of the PCB with exposed metal but was has hesitent using it on the "backside" with
all the resistors and transistors. Also what about the "back" of the microfon. Might this side be coated?
Do you have any experience with coatings @alex_rogers
Greetings,
Robin
9 February 2023 9:56pm
Cleaning the water damaged audiomoth boards is in full swing:
Left before, right after cleaning
Technical Officer – IMOS Animal Tracking Facility
7 February 2023 12:30pm
Commercially available connected audio sensors
2 February 2023 3:08pm
2 February 2023 3:55pm
Hi!
I am not aware of any such connected loggers/recorders but they would be nice.
The AudioMoths have been revolutionary in providing audologging at a low cost but they take a lot of "data muling" (carrying SD cards in and out of the field sites) and swapping of batteries.
Cheers,
2 February 2023 7:50pm
Hi Lars, thanks for the response. We are using lots of Song Meter Micro's atm and they have proved to be resilient. Just need something which doesn't involve going on site regularly - but get the data off.
3 February 2023 7:04pm
Rainforest Connection's (RFCx) Guardian devices may be of interest. They are solar-powered and have connectivity options for Wifi, GSM and satellite transfer. They've previously been used for detecting e.g., gunshots or chainsaws (using edge computing) and then sending positive detections/alerts to folks on the ground. RFCx also hosts Arbimon, a free, no-code software platform that facilitates analysis of audio data as well. Happy to chat more if you'd like to talk further about it!
Job: Building a network of conservation tech across continents
2 February 2023 1:50pm
6 April 2023 10:49pm
Hey Kate I don't have any explicit ideas at the moment but will think on it - such a cool concept! I wonder if there's some form of tactile spectrogram that you could develop, or a way that you could have them try to draw a representation (so assign some shape) of what they are hearing as a means of classification a call and then clustering those shapes? There's a way of creating an image using foam and paper I believe so they could have a tactile record of those shapes. Guess it depends what you want to the quantitative results to be. Super cool that you are looking for greater accessibility in acoustics!!!