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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

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New papers on passive acoustic monitoring

Couple of hot-off-the-press papers on different passive acoustic monitoring studies, including ones on manatees, coral reef fishes, woodpeckers, insects, and using ecoacoustic indices in marine soundscapes

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Another one I just came across -"Temporal separation of whale vocalizations from background oceanic noise using a power calculation"...
Another one - "Automatic acoustic heterogeneity identification in transformed landscapes from Colombian tropical dry forests" ...
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discussion

Microphone for bird monitoring on Raspberry Pi

Hi, I am building a system to monitor birds (i.e. ~50-20k Hz) using a Raspberry Pi and I am looking for the best option for the microphone. I am considering: - a USB...

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I can understand the reluctance to go down the I2c route on linux, but I bought some Adafruit MEMs mics (https://www.adafruit.com/product/3421) and they work fine.

If you want to dip a toe in the water, are not too cost concious, but want something you just plug in and it (largely) pretty much works, then I'd recommend looking at the seeed respeaker. Its an array, and is probably overkill for what you want. It does come with quite a bit of hand holding though, I got a "4 mic linear". Connect some jumper wires, screw on a board, install some software (!). OK for a POC (proof of concept) and as a sanity check.

Going back to the Adafruits mems breakouts, I have them wired back to the pi by re-using old CAT5 network cable, so the pi can be in one place and the mics somewhat remote - eg round the other side of a tree?  I configured a lot of software to get this working as I wanted, but it essentially removes "white noise", does file compression etc.   

apologies - ignore this reply (or if someone can delete it please do!) I have forum blindness and thought this thread was also about using Birdnet but I realise it isn't.... I suspect this is a setting on Birdnet-Pi so will post on their forums... 

Hi Paul, have been trying to get a i2c mic working with Birdnet but am having challenges in getting it working. I can install the adafruit mems you mention above and getting it working directly but when I try to use it through Birdnet I am failing. Have done some rebooting, testing, search forums but am drawing a blank - did yours work "out the box"? 

Hi Julien,

I use this mic for my raspberry pi setup and it works well picking up bird species singing in our garden while the mic and raspberry sit under our roof tiles.

Greetings,

Robin

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discussion

Help with AudioMoth configuration for bat recording

Hi! I am trying out some different settings with the AudioMoth configuration app to see the most suitable setup for recording bat species. After the device is configurated, I...

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Koen,

Hi - the config for the audiomoth looks fine (you could put a high-pass filter on to cover frequencies 12-96 kHz only). The scheduler is not set (you have 0 files per day), but presume this is just the screenshot.

The issue you have, though, is to do with your loudspeaker - presuming it is just a standard one. Standard music/computer speakers are tuned to human range of hearing and don't emit sound above around 20 kHz.  They won't emit ultrasound to 100 kHz.  For that you need specialised equipment.  If you want to generate some ultrasound yourself though, just rub your fingers together, or jangle some keys near the Audiomoth!

Hope that's of some use, Carlos

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event

BirdCLEF 2022 Kaggle Challenge

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology
Join the BirdCLEF 2022 Kaggle challenge, where you’ll use your machine learning skills to identify bird species by sound. You'll develop a model that can process continuous audio data and then acoustically recognize the...

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discussion

Acoustic monitoring - sharks

Would anyone know about the recommended number of months to conduct acoustic monitoring of sharks. This is part of a small grant project. Nine months are being proposed to...

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article

Introducing the WILDLABS On the Edge Fellows

WILDLABS Team
We're proud to introduce the first WILDLABS On the Edge Fellows for 2022, Loretta Schindlerova and Meredith Palmer! Working alongside expert Edge Impulse mentors, these two fellows will use embedded machine learning to...

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discussion

Using rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for AudioMoths and/or Swift's

Hi all, I'm wondering if anyone has experience using rechargeable lithium-ion batteries for passive acoustic devices, specifically Audiomoths (AA batteries) and Cornell...

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Actually it's interesting. I think it might be a good opportunity to think about how we can transition to rechargeable batteries in the field. Shipping them is possible if you follow postal rules and pay for hazardous material charges. But it needs to be planned in advance. Anyways, might be a good conversation to have in the community. But there also needs to be other foundational work like understanding how they're used, getting chargers in the field, and how to interface rechargeables to standard equipment.

I've taken rechargeable batteries on planes no problem - NiMH can go in checked luggage. I use NiMH D batteries for the Swift's, because they take more and so it still lasts long. The Audiomoth is harder, because it's just the 3 AAs and even with lithium-ion you only get ~1 month. The drop off to NiMH is like a week, from my (minimal) trial-and-erroring.

We've been using 18650 lithium ion protected cells in our BAR recorders since 2013. The protected cells are great because the protection circuitry kicks in to disconnect the battery and save it from being dicharged too much. It also protects against short circuit.

So if you did want to give 18650 batteries a try then I'd recommend a Keystone 1043P (P for polarised so you can only fit the battery one way)  battery holder and KeepPower protected 18650. There are a few other brands too that fit that battery holder ok but that's a common consistent brand.

Eizfan and XTAR make good chargers.

Most of our customers use them in the same continent and drive or road freight their recorders to site and so don' thave any problems shipping them.

We've heard of some problems on planes taking them as hand luggage and it's just luck of the draw if the particular person you encounter in the baggage area knows what their lithium ion battery policy is. I've usually heard of I think attempts to get this claried at the airline level has lead to a run around too.

Some people get to check them in if the batteries are fitted into the battery holders because they consider it built in like a phone or laptop. The spare batteries often go on as hand luggage. We have plastic battery cases to hold the cells for travel.

If you're sending it overseas we find that DHL, UPS and Fdex seem to take about a month to get the paperwork sorted out to give you permission on your account to ship lithium ion batteries with your recorders. Once you have permission though you can do it whenever you need to in the future for subsequenct studies. Look up the IATA regulations for packing lithium ion batteries with your equipment. You'll need to know this so you can tell DHL etc what permission you need and what you typically do. We use UN3481 packing instruction 966 section II becasue our cells are <20Wh and we can ship 5kg of batteries in a carton along with our recorders.

https://www.iata.org/en/publications/newsletters/iata-knowledge-hub/what-to-know-about-how-to-ship-lithium-batteries/

Mark Calder

Frontier Labs www.frontierlabs.com.au

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discussion

Special session on "Open-Source and Free Tools for Bioacoustics" at the ASA Meting in Denver

The 182nd meeting of the Acoustical Society of America will be held in Denver, CO, from 23 to 27 May 2022. During this meeting there will be a special session on ...

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Do you know if there are plans for remote attendance?

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event

Bioacoustics Webinar: Primates You May Have Missed

Wildlife Acoustics
Join Wildlife Acoustics on January 20th, 2022, at 3-5pm GMT for their free webinar, Primates You May Have Missed. At this event, participants will learn how bioacoustics can be used for primate research. 

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article

GroupGets: AudioMoth Underwater Case

Open Acoustic Devices
Don't miss your chance to order the AudioMoth Underwater Case through GroupGets! This campaign is for a waterproof case designed specifically for AudioMoth version 1.2.0 (without the 3.5mm socket), and for use at depths...

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article

New Paper: HydroMoth Testing

Remote Sensing in Ecology & Conservation
Open Acoustic Devices have tested their new HydroMoth, an affordable marine acoustic tool that could open up new avenues for marine conservationists without budget for expensive hydrophones. Read the newly published...

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Deep Learning for Marine Ecology and Conservation

arXiv (Journal)
This article provides a review of deep learning (predominantly ML) used in marine ecology and considerations for its future directions in conservation. In plain language, the authors provide a methodology for training...

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discussion

batch/automated cloud processing

I saw another thread asking about getting BirdNet (https://github.com/kahst/BirdNET) running on a Windoze machine, and thought I would expand on that question and ask what people...

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Hi Antoine, did you know about our bioacoustic recorders? https://frontierlabs.com.au/ . They have the best sound recording quality and built in GPS. You can have a listen to Australia here https://data.acousticobservatory.org/projects/1 . The Australian Acoustic Observatory uses 400 of our Solar BARs across Australia and the recordings are published for anyone to use.

Unfortunately there isn't software to do an easy bird census. Do you  need to know every bird you can hear or just the presence of one species?

Best regards, Mark

Wanted to chime with another option. My lab develops OpenSoundscape, a Python software package for training machine learning models for bioacoustic detection, especially convolutional neural networks. Check it out at http://opensoundscape.org/

 

I see that the list of bioacoustic softwares was mentioned earlier in the thread (thanks Carly!) - I'm always on the lookout for new softwares to add to that, so drop me a line if you see a package that is currently maintained and relevant to bioacoustics but is not included on the list. 
(Here's the link: https://github.com/rhine3/audiomoth-guide/blob/master/resources/analysis-software.md)

Hi all,

For everyone's reference but also a new one for your list Tessa (just checked and it isn't there yet) - 

Fuentes, M., Salamon, J., Zinemanas, P., Rocamora, M., Paja, G., Román, I. R., ... & Bello, J. P. (2021). Soundata: A Python library for reproducible use of audio datasets. arXiv preprint arXiv:2109.12690. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.12690. 

 

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MBARI shares trove of marine acoustic data

Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute
The Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has an extensive acoustic archive from underwater recordings and has made their valuable dataset available to researchers around the world via an open data registry on the...

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funding

Opportunity: μMoth v1.1 Group buy

Group Gets
GroupGets has a Group buy campaign for a μMoth v1.1(Round 2), that runs till  Sat, 06 Nov 2021 12:55:00 PDT. The μMoth v1.1 goes for a Single-unit price of  $99.99 + shipping.To join this buy, kindly visit this page

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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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