Hearing Bird Diversity in Soundscapes with Artificial Intelligence

March 20, 2023
Citizen Scientists Annotating Bird Vocalizations in Recordings

The Soundscapes to Landscapes (S2L, soundscapes2landscapes.org) project is a citizen science-driven project funded by NASA and led by Principal Investigator Dr. Matthew Clark. The goal of the project is to use sound recordings and remote sensing to monitor bird diversity, with Sonoma County as a testbed for methods. S2L researchers recently published a paper, led by SSU graduate Rose Snyder (now at Point Blue Conservation Science) on how they organized and motivated citizen scientists to deploy sound recorders and collect reference bird songs and calls. The S2L Sonoma archive now spans 5 years, 1500 sites, and over a million minutes of recordings, necessitating automated methods to extract useful information on biodiversity. Teaming up with computer scientists and expert bird enthusiasts, Dr. Clark and S2L collaborators used representative bird vocalizations to train an artificial intelligence algorithm to detect bird species in all recordings. These results were recently published in Ecological Informatics. S2L researchers are now engaged in ecological analysis with this trove of bird diversity data gleaned from sound recordings, including making spatial maps of bird species occurrence across the county that can be used for prioritizing conservation efforts or tracking change, such as after wildfires.

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