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Acoustic Monitoring / Feed

Bioacoustic monitoring is one of our biggest and most active groups, with members collecting and analysing acoustic data from every type of wildlife, from birds and bats to big cats, and even reptiles!

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Alex Rogers: Acoustic Devices for Biodiversity Monitoring — Smart Forests Atlas

In this radio episode, we speak to Alex Rogers, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Oxford. We discuss how Alex's research team developed the acoustic recording device AudioMoth, how low-cost technologies can democratise biodiversity monitoring, and how sensing technologies can lead to certain species and environments being monitored more than others.

Interviewers: Max Ritts and Michelle Westerlaken

Producer: Harry Murdoch

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The Variety Hour: March

Join us on Wednesday to talk about building autonomous camera traps for insects, updates about the arbimon tool for bioacoustics, the Biodiversity Accelerator+ which is now open for applications, and to hear about an...

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Exploring storage options for mass data collection

Hi all. I'm currently exploring options for data storage en masse. With our project we will be collecting 24hr hydrophone data, drone video 6hr per day, photography &...

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Hi Adam!

I mostly live within the ecoacoustics space so I'll just speak on the hydrophone part of your request; Arbimon is a free web/cloud-based platform with unlimited storage for audio files. We've got an uploader app as well for mass-uploading lots of files. There's also a bunch of spectrogram visualization/annotation tools and analysis workflows available. It's AWS running under the hood.

I have some experience working directly with AWS & Microsoft Azure, and I've found personally that AWS was more user-friendly and intuitive for the (fairly simplistic) kinds of tasks I've done.  

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Song Meter Micro experience?

Hi everyone, First off, what a great community this is! I only recently found out about it, and it seems like a game changer, especially for early career folk like me.I was...

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Our original tweet about this question is still getting replies! @baddiwad just jumped in to share her experiences in South Africa. I'm looking forward to our Inventory going live so all these can be captured in reviews on different hardware product pages! 

Hi Nick,

First up, disclaimer that I'm not really into hardware stuff, but here's my best understanding.

Shameless plug but take a look here if you haven't already - there's a fairly thorough discussion of available hardware: 

Secondly, I've not really used SM Mini (got one sat in a draw largely unused) but have heard feedback from several people, including a highly respected wildlife sound recorder yesterday. All have found that the very strange frequency response with a big peak in response at 6kHz to be a big problem, leading to odd recording quality and difficulty trusting results. I think particularly in Amazonia, you're likely to find a big peak in insect stridulation amplitude at around the 6kHz mark at any time away from the dawn chorus, so setting gain that will capture a large amount of other taxa without being completely dominated by insect noise ta 6Khz would seem a pretty impossible challenge.

If I was starting anew project now, I think my first choice would be SM Mini, although I think I'd take a good look at Titley Chorus, and Audiomoths if I could get my hands on any.

 

Good luck, and feel free to DM me on Twitter if you want to chat about Amazonian recording (@ecoacou_ollie). I don't check Wildlabs as often as I should (sorry Steph!), despite it beinga fantastic resource.

Cheers,

Ollie

Frequency response plot from Wildlife Acoustics website:

Frequency response taken from Wildlife Acoustics website
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AudioMoth and Song Meter Micro battery life tests

Our group recently tested the battery life of the AudioMoth and Song Meter Micro recorders under a variety of conditions (multiple sample rates, gain settings, device temperatures...

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Hi Justin, looks like the link is not working!

Hi Justin, 

Dropping in a question you've received over on twitter:

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The Arbimon newsletter is back! 

Rainforest Connection (RFCx) is bringing back the Arbimon newsletter for 2023! We're excited to share new features and tools of the platform, what's coming up, and some insights into our projects on bioacoustic...

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careers

Research Assistants in Kitzes Lab

Our group once again has openings for Research Assistants to work with us on our bioacoustics projects. A job ad and description of how to apply are below - please feel free to get in touch with any questions!

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Cleaning audiomoth circuit board

Hi everyone,unfortunatly I got quite a few audiomoth boards with different levels of water damage.I removed the battery holder and plan on cleaning the boards. Do you have any...

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I'd also add that if the boards are just dirty or dusty, you can just remove all batteries, then wash with a toothbrush and water. Air dry (or use compressed air which speeds things up greatly) and then spot clean areas that need solvent with isopropanol as Harold mentioned. Also if you don't have access to conformal coating, you can also use a non-conductive clear lacquer.  The conformal coating covers all the components and prevents short circuits due to conductive water (ie: salt water) or other contaminants. However if you do use a conformal coating, make sure all cables are connected first and the device is in the exact state that it will be deployed in. Also don't conformal coat the battery connectors since you'll want to change out batteries periodically.

Hi Akiba, 
thanks for your this great advice! I used the conformal coating on parts
of the PCB with exposed metal but was has hesitent using it on the "backside" with 
 all the resistors and transistors. Also what about the "back" of the microfon. Might this side be coated?
Do you have any experience with coatings @alex_rogers 

Greetings,
Robin  

 

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Commercially available connected audio sensors

Hi - can anyone advise if there is a commercially made passive audio recorder that can be powered by solar/battery and have 3g/4g connectivity - ideally with compression on the...

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Hi!

I am not aware of any such connected loggers/recorders but they would be nice. 

The AudioMoths have been revolutionary in providing audologging at a low cost but they take a lot of "data muling" (carrying SD cards in and out of the field sites) and swapping of batteries.

Cheers,

 

Hi Lars, thanks for the response. We are using lots of Song Meter Micro's atm and they have proved to be resilient. Just need something which doesn't involve going on site regularly - but get the data off. 

Rainforest Connection's (RFCx) Guardian devices may be of interest. They are solar-powered and have connectivity options for Wifi, GSM and satellite transfer. They've previously been used for detecting e.g., gunshots or chainsaws (using edge computing) and then sending positive detections/alerts to folks on the ground. RFCx also hosts Arbimon, a free, no-code software platform that facilitates analysis of audio data as well. Happy to chat more if you'd like to talk further about it! 

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discussion

Hydromoth settings

Hi Everyone,what is your #HydroMoth setup for freshwater ecoacoustic monitoring? What are your settings for...

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Hi Robin,

Did you ever get any responses to your query?  Just recovered a hydromoth I was testing for MPA monitoring, but all the files have no audio on them.  Was curious what others were doing underwater.

 

Jake

 

Hi Jacob, 
you are the first one but I have been talking to other scientist 
about their projects. Right now we are recording and hopefully automatically detecting Eurasian otter (Lutra lutra) vocalisations.
Did you find out why your files were empty or was the sound level just too low?

Greetings from Austria,
Robin

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AI for Forest Elephants Challenge

FruitPunch AI is hosting the AI for Forest Elephants Challenge. Together with 50+ AI enthusiasts and experts from all over the globe, we will apply AI to detect gunshots and elephant rumbles on sound monitoring...

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