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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

event

Audiomoth online conference

For the second time, you can join an online conference dedicated to the little green bioacoustics device known as Audiomoth.

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Hello! Is it possible to get a recording of this conference? I am working on a conservation project using Audiomoth and I think the material covered in this conference will be...
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Large scale bioacoustic analysis in the Peruvian Amazon

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.

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careers

Reviewing Now: Animal Telemetry Postdoctoral Fellowship

Smithsonian Environmental Research Center
The Smithsonian Institution seeks a field- and data-oriented biologist to support marine animal telemetry research and to assist with activities of the Atlantic Cooperative Telemetry (ACT) Network. 

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Building a new recording device for sound localization

Hi all, Nice group! I'm building an acoustic monitoring device that I wanted to share as it may be of interest to some people and also I'd like to know of any requirements that...

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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.

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.

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.

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discussion

Hydromoth settings

Hi Everyone,what is your #HydroMoth setup for freshwater ecoacoustic monitoring? What are your settings for underwater recording with your AudioMoth? I would love to dicuss...

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Hi Ian, are you in Brisbane? We're based in Brisbane also. You can borrow a few BARLT and Aquarian Audio hydrophones for a little while to compare against your hydromoth. We have localisation also using the inbuilt GPS and software to time align the calls. It'll probably save you time. You can run a microphone and hydrophone on a cable on the one recorder.

Hi Ian,

I have hours of an unidentified creature recorded during overnight recording sessions with mutliple hydrophones. We think it is platypus but there is nothing to compare against that isn't from captive sounds. I am waiting on the Hydromoth to become available again so I can do longer term monitoring.

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article

#Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge: Judges' Panel Honorees

WILDLABS Team
Please join us in celebrating this year’s top #Tech4Wildlife Photo Challenge Honorees as chosen by our panel of leading conservation organization judges, and enjoy the story contained within these entries about how our...

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discussion

LABMaker

Does anyone have experience of LABMaker?Has it been good? Bad? Any comments or feedback? We are looking for groups who could help us to manufacture a piece of open hardware. Also...

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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

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discussion

Bat Identification Tools Comparison

Hello, does anyone have any experience comparing the results of Bat identification software for large batch processing? I would be processing significant amounts of audio...

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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. 

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.

Another option for you could be Arbimon - it's free and does not require any coding/programming knowledge! 

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discussion

ISO Speakers for Emerging Technologies class.

Hi Everyone, Apologies for posting across multiple groups.  I'm teaching a new course @ Clark University next semester on emerging technologies for conservation. The course...

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Definitely interested! I'm in the ecoacoustics/acoustic monitoring space, working at Rainforest Connection and Arbimon.

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discussion

Frontier Labs BAR-LT Localization Firmware

I am using the Frontier Labs BAR-LT recorders for acoustic localization for the first time. I noticed that the Frontier Labs guide to acoustic localization mentions the need to...

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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

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New Paper: Identification of fish sounds

Xavier Mouy recently shared this new bioacoustics paper on Twitter. This research focuses on identifying fish sounds in relation to specific species through the use of three underwater portable audio-video platforms. The proposed array designs successfully identified fish sounds, and this paper covers instructions for others working in marine bioacoustics who would like to apply these ideas to their own work.

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