Bioaccoustic Wildlife Monitoring : soundscapes to landscapes

‘Soundscapes to Landscapes' is a new collaborative initiative run by the Sonoma State University and based in California. The University's partners include ‘Point Blue Conservation,' private landowners across the country, and other smaller non-government organizations.

Soundscapes to Landscapes leverages bioaccoustic technology, meaning it aims to document, track, and learn about wildlife across the country through processing audio recordings. Currently, Soundscapes to Landscapes has established more than 1,300 audio recorders across California, not counting those privately set up by landowners.

This audio is then amassed and processed through an artificial intelligence that sorts out what each sound in the recordings are. This is helpful as the human margin of error for audio processing is quite large, with some scientists mistaking artificial noises, such as a distant motorbike, for animal noises in the past.

After processing and decoding the audio data, the organizations involved in Soundscapes to Landscapes aim to learn more about the species that live in California. As the audio recording process is unintrusive to the natural state of animals, this is an effective way to record the natural states of wildlife.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Source link