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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 paper - An integrated passive acoustic monitoring and deep learning pipeline for black-and-white ruffed lemurs in Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar

We demonstrate the power of using passive acoustic monitoring & machine learning to survey species, using ruffed lemurs in southeastern Madagascar as an example.

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What an awesome paper! Loved learning about such a promising research tool in PAM combined with a CNNs, and that lemur vocalizations are termed as "roar-shrieks" :)
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Questionnaire for Pain Points and Needs in Bioacoustics

Hi! We're engineers eager to understand how technology can simplify acoustic work. If you use recorders, your input would be invaluable. Please consider taking our 5min survey. As a thank you, participants will be entered into a draw for a Audio Moth Recorder! Thank you so much!!

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Monitoring setup  in the forest based on the wifi with 2.4 GHz frequency.

I am planning to setup the network using the wireless with frequency 2.4GHz. Can I get the the data for this signal distortion in the forest area?Is there any any special...

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Hi Dilip,

I do not have data about signal distortion in a forest area and with the signal you are intended to use.

However, in a savannah environment, when I put a tour on the highest point of the park, Lora signal (avg 900MHz) is less distorted than WiFi signal (2.4GHz). This is normal as a physics law: the frequency determines the wave length, and the less the length (obviously the less the frequency), the less obstructed the signal.

So, without interfering with your design, I would say that in a forest configuration, WiFi will need more access points deployed and may be more costly, and in your context, even when using LoRa, you will need more gateways than I have in a savannah.

To design the approximate number of gateways, you may need to use terrain Visibility analysis.

To design the cameras deployment, you will need to comply with the sampling methods defined in your research. However, if it is on for surveillance reasons, you may need to rely on terrain visibility analysis also.

Best regards.

I've got quite a lot of experience with wireless in forested areas and over long(ish) ranges.

Using a wifi mesh is totally possible, and it will work.  You will likely not get great range between units.  You will likely need to have your mesh be fairly adaptable as conditions change.

Wireless and forests interact in somewhat unpredictable ways it turns out.  Generally, wireless is attenuated by water in the line-of-sight between stations.  From the Wifi perspective, a tree is just a lot of water up in the air.  Denser forest = more water = worse communications. LoRa @ 900Mhz is less prone to this issue than Wifi @ 2.4Ghz and way less prone than Wifi @ 5Ghz.  But LoRa is also fairly low data rate.  Streaming video via LoRa is possible with a lot of work, but video streaming is not at all what LoRa was build to do, and it does it quite poorly at best.

The real issue I see here is to do with power levels.  CCTV, audio streaming, etc are high data rate activities.  You may need quite a lot of power to run these systems effectively both for the initial data collection and then for the communications.

If you are planning to run mains power to each of these units, you may be better off running an ethernet cable as well.  Alternatively, you can run "power line" networking, which has remarkably good bandwidth and gets you back down to a single twisted pair for power and communications.

If you are planning to run off batteries and/or solar, you may need a somewhat large power system to support your application?

 

I would recommend going with Ubiquity 2.4Ghz devices which have performed relatively well in dense foliage of the California Redwood forests. It took a lot of tweaking to find paths through the dense tree cover as mentioned in the previous posts. 

 

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Audiomoth Bat Call Triggering Settings

We are considering buying audiomoth for recording bat calls for our Citibats Cambodia project[1]. I would like to learn about your experience of using Audiomoth for record bat...

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Nils Bouillard (@Nilsthebatman) would be good to talk with! 

Adrià López-Baucells also has lots of useful info on his website.

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Program Officer - Bioacoustics, WILDLABS

Come join our team! We're looking for a Program Officer to join the WILDLABS Community, hosted by WCS in Argentina. This role will support our research program, with the chosen candidate leading our horizon scanning...

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Recycled & DIY Remote Monitoring Buoy

Hello everybody, My name is Brett Smith, and I wanted share an open source remote monitoring buoy we have been working on in Seychelles as part of our company named "...

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Hello fellow Brett. Cool project. You mentioned a waterseal testing process. Is there documentation on that?

I dont have anything written up but I can tell what parts we used and how we tested.



Its pretty straightforward, we used this M10 Enclosure Vent from Blue Robotics:

 

Along with this nipple adapter:

Then you can use any cheap hand held break pump to connect to your enclosure. You can pump a small vacuum in and make sure the pressure holds.

Here's a tutorial video from blue robotics:

 





Let me know if you have any questions or if I can help out.

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Looking for a Supervisor/Research Group - ML-driven Marine Biomonitoring

Hi everyone, I am a final year MEng Computing student at Imperial College London interested in improving marine biodiversity monitoring with machine learning.I have...

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Hi Filippo, 

Nice to read your message. Have you thought of contacting anyone in the Bioscience department at UCL? In our group "the People and Nature Lab", a few PhD students (Ben and Jason) are working on ML methods for coral reef monitoring. Might be interesting to reach out to them. List of People at CBER.

Best, Aude

 

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Bird Acoustic Surveys: Comparison with traditional transect methods

Baker Consultants Releases Whitepaper Comparing Traditional & Ecoacoustic Bird Survey MethodsBaker Consultants is pleased to announce the release of its latest ecoacoustics...

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Hi Theresa.  In comparison to traditional survey, I think that the time/cost benefits of acoustics are good.  Certainly the set-up, maintenance, and data management requirements are minimal. And if there is significant travel time to site, and the recording period of acoustic survey is long, then I think the benefits are compounded (i.e. there are economies of scale to acoustics that you don't get with trad surveys).



Until the last year or two, the data analysis for species identification has been the time-consuming part.  However, now that systems such as BirdNET are available, this issue is fairly well dealt with (but still needs a little bit of skill/experience).



A couple of scientific papers have assessed these costs/benefits - I hope these make an interesting read.

Carlos

 

A very nice read, especially for me someone new to the field as myself. Nice to see all of the various approaches and to know I wasn't re-inventing the wheel but adding something new (Potential new platform for real time localization).

Looks like my timing wasn't ideal to be included in your summary. Maybe for version #2 :)



 

Thanks for sharing!

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Practical sound localization on the Raspberry Pi

I finally got around to writing a high level article about how to sound localize with the sbts-aru such that first time users might actually be able to do it by themselves now.I...

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Hydromoth for coastal & offshore surveying

Hi all! I'm interested in deploying a Hydromoth on an Uncrewed Surface Vehicle (USV) to collect acoustic data for biodiversity analysis, for coastal and offshore marine surveys....

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Hi Sol,

I think your concern is well placed.  The pros typically tow an array of hydrophones, in its simpler configuration it looks like a long fat rubber hose containing maybe a dozen transducers feeding their electrical signals to a recording unit back on the ship.  All this is done to reduce noise from the ship, from waves crashing, and flow noise.  The multiple transducers can also be electronically tuned to be directional so that it can be "pointed" away from a noise source (like the ship).

In your position, I would just try the simplest thing that could work, then fix the problems as they arise.  It could be you may need to be dead in the water while recording.  To address surface noise (slapping waves, wind), you could mount the hydromoth low down on a spar buoy, which you tow into position.

 

Best of luck, it sounds like an interesting project (c:

Hydromoths are great for the price but they do not have the most streamlined housing and audio quality won't be as good as something like a SoundTrap or really any recorder with a proper hydrophone and 16-bit +DAQ system.

If you can afford it, this is an excellent SoundTrap based towed autonomous system NOAA have been using. It might work towed behind an autonomous vehicle

Alternatively, if you can have something inside the vehicle, a simple tape recorder (e.g. Tascam DR40X) and hydrophone on cable  will provide excellent sound quality. You could also use something like a Raspberry Pi with audio focussed ADC hat to record but that would require a bit more programming. Even consider a standard AudioMoth and plug a proper hydrophone into the audio jack - this would still have a 12-bit ADC but would provide better sound quality than a hydromoth (hydrophones are more omnidirectional and there's no air filled causing reflections and attenuation)

If you are considering an external microphone and a towed system, then you would also be in a position to consider a raspberry pi with an external microphone with sbts-aru. Another option:



 

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New Raspberry Pi Sound Localizing ARU is now fully released and ready for use

Hi All,My low cost Raspberry Pi based sound localizing ARU is now fully released and ready for use. You can download it from here: It installs and configures with just one...

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When I designed the recorder. I chose it to use jackd2 instead of pulse audio or direct alsa access because unless I was mistaken it could support multiple consumers of the sound source and the other approaches not.

Originally its purpose was part of my security system so it records as well as being able to connect and listen live. That’s simply a case of also installing icecast2 and darkice onto the same system. Then I discovered bio-acoustics and pivoted and then discovered wildlabs 😀

In principle you could both those things as well as real time audio pattern matching no problem.

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Which market-available microphones, accelerometers and GIS sensors for dogs / pets ?

I have conducted an MSc thesis in data-science applied on bioacoustics data, and wish to carry on some experiments on my own now, using domestic environment as a lab.I am looking...

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good to know that GPS coordinates can be used to sync the time. 
Does GPS resolution allow to a desired time resolution (e.g. seconds) ? Does choice of time resolution significantly depends on the physiology of the animal (e.g. time of re-action to stimuli, hence less than a second) or for most animal communication and animal behaviour is it enough above a second? 
 

I am not an acoustics person but train and deploy canines in the field. Are you looking for something that records  sniff rate and patterns?  For GPS I just use a Garmin collar system Altha 100. There is a Conservation Canine group that might be worth asking your question in. 

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Call for Interview Subjects: Conservation Bioacoustics Methods

As a part of my ongoing doctoral research in Geography at Royal Holloway University of London, I’m looking for a new round of interview subjects who are willing to share their...

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Happy to help Samuel, will send a message

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Deploying Song Meters in Nigeria

Exciting deployment of these acoustic song meters by Wildlife Acoustics, Inc. in another one of the Important Bird Areas in Nigeria - International institute of tropical...

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Hi Joan,

Sounds like a great project! I would recommend having a look at some of the nice review literature and guidelines that are out there, like - 

And some specific to nocturnal birds:

And a study on bird acoustic monitoring in Nigeria:

 

In terms of processing and analyzing the data, I work for Rainforest Connection which maintains Arbimon - a free, no-code ecoacoustic analysis platform to help automate species detection and classification within soundscapes. If you're interested, you can get started with our support docs!

There are also a number of stats packages for analyzing soundscape data (seewave, monitoR, warbleR in R; and OpenSoundscape, scikit-maad in Python).  

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Flying with li-ion batteries

Hi everyone, quick question about travelling with acoustic monitoring kit:Has anyone had experience flying international from the US with a load of 18650 Li-ion...

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The 18650s should be packed in discrete holders to separate them and prevent them from shorting. I've taken up to 50 on a plane before. 100 might be a tall ask since most planes have limitations on total Amp Hours you can bring. 

These are the holders I use.

Good luck.

Thanks Akiba, good to know you had no problems with those, and those cases look good. Having read a bit more, it actually seems that in theory there is no limit to the number of batteries you can bring, as long as each is <100Wh. Seems like I'll be testing that theory...

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