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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Schäuffelhut Berger GmbH
data scientist/algorithmic dev - caught fire for movement ecology
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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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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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We're very pleased to announce the publication of new 'Good practice guidelines for long-term ecoacoustic monitoring in the UK', produced by Manchester Metropolitan University, Baker Consultants Ltd and a great team of...
23 February 2023
Rainforest Connection (RFCx), in collaboration with USFWS, seek four Puerto Rican field agents to assist in deploying and retrieving audio recorders for a long-term biodiversity monitoring project in and around six...
22 February 2023
Our group once again has openings for Research Assistants to work with us on our bioacoustics projects. A job ad and description of how to apply are below - please feel free to get in touch with any questions!
16 February 2023
The Cornell University Lab of Ornithology is seeking a Software Developer to join the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics.
10 February 2023
You will develop and apply novel approaches and machine learning techniques for the detection, classification and identification of marine fauna from passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) validated with paired visual...
10 February 2023
IMOS Animal Tracking Facility is hiring a Technical Officer to assist with the preparation, deployment and maintenance of acoustic receivers to monitor movements of tagged animals & continue to develop operational...
7 February 2023
Are you excited by the potential for new technologies to help monitor the natural world? Do you enjoy communicating your passion for technology and nature with diverse audiences? We are seeking an enthusiastic...
2 February 2023
Consultancy opportunity at ZSL for an experienced monitoring specialist to support species monitoring in rewilding landscapes across Europe
31 January 2023
Are you stuck on an AI or ML challenge in your conservation work? Apply now for the chance to receive tailored expert advice from data scientists! Applications due 27th January 2023
18 January 2023
WILDLABS and Fauna & Flora International are seeking an early career Vietnamese conservationist for 12-month paid internship position to grow and support the Southeast Asia regional community in our global...
11 January 2023
To assist with creative research project in the DC/VA/MD region
6 January 2023
Careers
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Recently updated products
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
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Hi all,I'm curious to hear experiences/thoughts on mounting microphones in potted instrument housings that will receive a fair amount of... |
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Acoustics | 23 hours 43 minutes ago | |
Hi Tabitha, What recording settings were you using when you saw these differences? I've measured the consumption across some different firmware versions and I can't see any... |
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Acoustics | 2 days 6 hours ago | |
Wow.. Really exciting to see this effort. Congratulations on the award!I have been interested in this subject for a long time, as we have elephant-human conflicts in plenty in... |
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Acoustics | 1 week ago | |
Hello!Long time, no update. @StephODonnell suggested I post here with my thesis and some reflections. ---------------------------------------------------------TL;DR... |
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Acoustics | 2 weeks 3 days ago | |
I think I've landed on the Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter Mini Bat 2 for now, but I'm definitely interested to see how this cheaper tech progresses |
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Acoustics | 2 weeks 3 days ago | |
Hi Jesse,For a material to be acoustically transparent (in air), the speed of sound in the material times its density must match that of air. Realistically, any solid... |
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Acoustics, Biologging | 2 weeks 4 days ago | |
Hi Steph, We appreciate the support! Thanks for the tag and your help managing the community!Patrick |
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Sensors, Acoustics, Conservation Dogs, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions | 2 weeks 4 days ago | |
Hi Sol,If the maximum depth is 30m, it would be worth experimenting with HydroMoth in this application especially if the deployment time is short. As Matt says, the air-filed case... |
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Acoustics, AI for Conservation, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Sustainable Fishing Challenges | 2 weeks 4 days ago | |
Oh wow, thank you so much!!!I will keep that four advices in mind! |
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Acoustics | 2 weeks 4 days ago | |
You won't get any audio if you don't allow enough time for the hydromoth/audiomoth to write. So when you do a continuous recording you need to experiment a little. I'm sure there... |
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Acoustics | 2 weeks 6 days ago | |
Congratulations! My first hydromoth was just arrived yesterday and so excited! Looking forward for the update from your project!!! |
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Acoustics, Biologging, Climate Change, Conservation Tech Training and Education, Data management and processing tools, Emerging Tech, Open Source Solutions, Protected Area Management Tools, Sensors, Software and Mobile Apps | 2 weeks 6 days ago | |
If you have the resources, I would suggest testing the sensitivity and directionality of the system at relevant frequencies both with and without an external mic, and let the... |
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Acoustics | 2 weeks 6 days 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