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
General Purpose Electronics Engineer
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Hello, I am working as Enterprise Solution Architect with Department of Conservation, New Zealand Government. I am keen to learn the progresses and advancements made in the conservation space. This will provide us the starting point to collaborate and implement the technology.Tkx
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 12 Groups
A systems and policy specialist, currently working as the Quality & Accreditation Manager for Ceres Tag.
- 0 Resources
- 4 Discussions
- 14 Groups
The WIidlife Trusts
- 0 Resources
- 5 Discussions
- 2 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 1 Discussions
- 9 Groups
Wildlife Biologist and Conservation Scientist
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 4 Groups
Cornell University
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
- 0 Resources
- 14 Discussions
- 3 Groups
Ph.D. Student @ the Movement Ecology lab, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 1 Groups
data scientist/algorithmic dev - caught fire for movement ecology
- 0 Resources
- 2 Discussions
- 7 Groups
Wildlife Biologist/Conflict Specialist and drone enthusiast in Montana
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 5 Groups
Hi, Cynthia Gichimu here. I'm a conservationist, and a champion for youths. I believe in environmental sustainability for posterity. I volunteer as a Project Officer with the Friends of Kinangop Plateau, a community-based local action group committed to biodiversity conservation.
- 0 Resources
- 0 Discussions
- 3 Groups
PAM & transfer learning, defining occupancy in surveys, effects of anthropogenic noise on fish, soundscapes to track ecosystem recovery, detecting sharks with echosounders, using PAMGuard to detect marine mammals
21 June 2022
The Sound and Light Ecology Team, a collaboration between Colorado State University and National Park Service scientists, is hiring an acoustic ecology postdoctoral fellow in Fort Collins, CO.
16 June 2022
Rainforest Connection has multiple engineering positions that will suppor their work developing acoustic monitoring devices.
16 June 2022
Video recording of workshop held in Madagascar + PDFs of slide, links to other resources & terrestrial PAM bibliography
13 June 2022
Acoustic pingers to reduce net entanglement of river dolphins, acoustic observatories for sperm whales, detectability of dolphin whistles, monitoring sperm whales through echolocation rates
11 June 2022
Article
A new web portal for annotating bird sounds has been opened called Bird Sounds Global (BSG). It is part of project LIFEPLAN, and its key objective is to develop global, automated software for bird sound identification.
10 June 2022
2
2
Julia Martínez Pardo et al., Published in Biological Conservation
4 June 2022
1
Microchip has just announced the 1 GHz SAMA7G54 single-core Arm Cortex-A7 microprocessor (MPU) with MIPI CSI-2 and parallel camera interfaces, as well as up to four I2S, one SPDIF transmitter and receiver, and a 4-...
3 June 2022
"A drone emitting orca sounds will be used in attempt to guide the animal, whose health is fast deteriorating"
1 June 2022
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
29 May 2022
2
1
Article
Authors: Danielle I. Rappaport, Anshuman Swain, William F. Fagan, Ralph Dubayah, Douglas C. Morton
29 May 2022
1
Community Announcement
Are you an early career Kenyan conservationist looking to explore emerging conservation technologies while networking with a strong cohort of other female leaders? Apply now for our 6-month Women in Conservation Tech...
8 March 2022
August 2022
1
Description | Activity | Replies | Groups | Updated |
---|---|---|---|---|
Hmm 20kg raised 5m would only buy you less than half an AA battery assuming 100% efficiency. Lame, so much for that idea. |
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 2 days 21 hours ago | |
It continues to be difficult to source microcontrollers due to global supply chain issues, but Open Acoustic Devices have managed to source a small supply for an initial... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, Marine Conservation | 3 days 16 hours ago | |
Hi!I deployed passive acoustic recorders to detect animal calls but on one of my devices the date & time settings got messed up and reverted to the default (Jan 1, 2000). And... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 4 days 1 hour ago | |
@gracieermi & I are happy to announce the latest update to the Conservation Tech Directory, bringing our total... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation, Biologging, Camera Traps, Community Base, Data management and processing tools , Drones, eDNA & Genomics, Remote Sensing & GIS, Software and Mobile Apps | 4 days 9 hours ago | |
Awesome stuff!! Interested in what kind of recorders you are using and how are you sync'ing them for the TDOA? |
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 1 week 1 day ago | |
Jamie's tip piqued my curiosity, so I bought what I thought might be what Jamie was talking about. It is an SK-001 as detailed here (not my video) for SGD4 or thereabouts.... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 1 week 3 days ago | |
Hi Eric, Dropping in a reply we had over on Linkedin here. Annoyingly I can't do a snazzy embed of the comment - will fix that!Anton Baotic shared: I guess it depends on... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, Early Career | 1 week 4 days ago | |
Thank you @carlybatist , @Freaklabs and @MK . The inputs are very useful and I am progressing on my project based on that. Appreciate a lot. |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation | 1 week 5 days ago | |
@alex_rogers jumping in too: |
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 3 weeks 1 day ago | |
Gahh so wish I could be in 2 places at once... the CV4Ecology summer school at CalTech starts August 1 as well & I'll be there. But super awesome concept and hope I can attend... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 3 weeks 4 days ago | |
Fascinating article, combining machine learning and acoustical signals to correlate coral reef health.... |
|
Acoustic Monitoring, AI for Conservation, Marine Conservation | 1 month ago | |
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,... |
+2
|
Acoustic Monitoring | 1 month ago |
HydroMoth GroupGets campaign
28 June 2022 at 11:07am
1.5 TB micro SD
28 June 2022 at 09:10am
29 June 2022 at 05:28am
Went down a rabbit hole reading the battery threads on here. It strikes me that gravity batteries might be a good solution in rainforests. String a line over the highest branch you can and then raise as much weight as you can. I'm unfamiliar with the power requirements of camera traps / audiomoths but I might do some napkin calcs if i'm bored this week. @carlybatist
29 June 2022 at 06:06am
Hmm 20kg raised 5m would only buy you less than half an AA battery assuming 100% efficiency. Lame, so much for that idea.
Renaming files with incorrect timestamps
28 June 2022 at 02:12am
New Conservation Tech Directory update
27 June 2022 at 04:45pm
Acoustic multilateration for gibbons
22 June 2022 at 11:49am
23 June 2022 at 02:03pm
Awesome stuff!! Interested in what kind of recorders you are using and how are you sync'ing them for the TDOA?
New papers on passive acoustic monitoring
21 June 2022 at 09:44pm
Hiring Acoustic Ecology Postdoctoral Fellow
16 June 2022 at 04:02pm
Multiple Roles with Rainforest Connection

16 June 2022 at 09:15am
Passive acoustic training workshop video/materials
13 June 2022 at 04:03pm
New papers on marine acoustic monitoring
11 June 2022 at 02:36pm
Bird Sounds Global web portal
10 June 2022 at 02:03pm
11 June 2022 at 01:41pm
11 June 2022 at 06:10pm
Bird Acoustic Solution
9 June 2022 at 11:31pm
11 June 2022 at 01:16pm
There are a bunch of different options for detecting calls in audio data, from proper statistical platforms such as R/Python, to bespoke software such as Arbimon, Kaleidoscope & Raven. Edge Impulse also an online ML model-building interface, but this is more focused on then deploying the models onto devices for edge computing. Arbimon has template matching features that are a good way to start finding detections to build a training dataset, I have used it for this in the past. Arbimon is online & free. Kaleidoscope has a clustering function which is again a good first step to start picking out the low-hanging fruit of detections so to speak. It's a desktop app, but this is not free ($400/yr). Raven also has some automated features - template & band-limited entropy detectors. It's also a desktop app and not free ($100-$800 depending on 1-year or permanent license and whether non-profit or not; not sure where a government agency would fit into that).
There is always the ubiquitous split between biologists who traditionally are taught to use R and tech/computer folks who are taught to use Python, but for ML, Python's ecosystem is really well set up. Not sure what the level of programming you/your dept has, but there are a TON of free resources online for learning it if you were interested.
Relevant Python bioacoustics packages potentially of use - Acoustic_Indices, scikit-maad, Ketos, OpenSoundscape (as well as the obvious ML ones such as TensorFlow)
Some R packages as well - soundecology, bioacoustics, monitoR, warbleR, gibbonR
@tessa_rhinehart has created a fabulous list of bioacoustics software that you can find here: https://github.com/rhine3/bioacoustics-software.
You can also turn to articles that have already done similar things and reach out to the authors to discuss their methods. I've got a (totally un-exhaustive) list of papers on passive acoustic monitoring, with a section on 'analyses' that you might find useful to start with; I can email it to you if you'd like. Working on a PAM training materials page on my website that it will be available at shortly as well (will post the link to Wildlabs when it's live!).
Hope this is helpful!
16 June 2022 at 09:27am
Hi,
Look at this publication (below) and download the BirdNet app. The computer code is provided to train ML algorithm that will allow you to tailor the model with your own data.
Thanks, Mrigesh
20 June 2022 at 01:00am
Thank you @carlybatist , @Freaklabs and @MK . The inputs are very useful and I am progressing on my project based on that. Appreciate a lot.
Careers in Bioacoustics
9 June 2022 at 05:13pm
20 June 2022 at 06:02pm
Hi Eric,
Dropping in a reply we had over on Linkedin here. Annoyingly I can't do a snazzy embed of the comment - will fix that!
I guess it depends on whether you want to stay in academia or go into industry. Overtime working hours are preprogrammed in academia without appropriate compensation. Austrian funding agencies pay a reasonable wage. I believe it could be improved.
I've always enjoyed working with exotic animals like elephants, giraffes, and giant pandas, as well as the collaborative and international work. This experience shaped me into the person I am today, and I don't want to missany of it. Personally, I believe that bioacoustics has not received the respect that it deserves, including the bioacousticians who put their lives into their projects. I am convinced that bioacoustics can be a valuable tool in conservation. Throughout my career, non-academics and the tech industry have approached me numerous times about using bioacoustics as a conservation monitoring tool. And I frequently feel stepped on when asked to provide material without appreciating the work behind the data, especially when it comes from economically-driven institutes that are unwilling to compensate. The fact is that the best conservation Technology is meaningless without solid basic data.
In retrospective, a more tech-oriented educational background would have been good!
Steph
Ocean Tracking Network - Telemetry Data Study Hall
8 June 2022 at 06:48pm
28 June 2022 at 11:33pm
If only I didn't work in rainforests where canopies preclude solar panels.... *sigh* lol