YouTube video by Scientific American

Bird calls hold critical information about ecosystems and effectiveness of conservation initiatives, yet turning ecoacoustic recordings into actionable conservation insights remains a major...

Across Latin America, thousands of autonomous recording devices are capturing the sounds of forests every day. Hidden within these recordings is valuable information about species occurrence, biodiversity patterns, and ecological change. Yet transforming millions of recordings into reliable biodiversity data remains one of the greatest bottlenecks in modern conservation. While advances in passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) have made it easier than ever to collect biodiversity data, processing and validating that information still requires significant time, expertise, and computational resources. As monitoring programs continue to grow, so does the need for scalable tools that can transform raw audio into actionable ecological insights. Building Chorus with Conservation Partners To help address this challenge, WildMon has partnered with The National Audubon Society and Audubon Latin America and the Caribbean, with support from the Bezos Earth Fund and in collaboration with the Kitzes Lab at the University of Pittsburgh, to co-create a bespoke AI-powered ecoacoustic processing platform for the Escucha Aves project. Escucha Aves is a project in which local communities and organizations use autonomous audio recorders and artificial intelligence (AI) to monitor birds and generate evidence for improved management of conservation areas supported by the Conserva Aves initiative in the Tropical Andes. Rather...

On July 21, the result was published on bioRxiv, an online server where scientists post studies while a journal reviews them — in this case Scientific Data, published by Nature Research. With it, India has its first open-access, crowdsourced ecoacoustic dataset of multiple distinct groups of organisms, a library of wild sound built by volunteers and free for anyone to use — a chorus of 518 species across 25 states and union territories. Set against the staggering scale of the subcontinent’s wildlife, the tally may be modest, but it is a step towards using sound to study nature in the country. Until now, India’s ecoacoustic recordings existed in scattered collections. This open-access dataset gives scientists a shared resource to improve biodiversity monitoring and helps AI identify Indian wildlife more accurately. “When ecologists do bird surveys on the field, we usually do a point count,” said Pooja Choksi, a Mumbai-based ecological restoration scientist and a co-founder of the Indian Ecoacoustics Network (IEN), the collective behind the dataset. “You go to a spot in a forest, wait for 15 minutes, and note down all the birds you can observe in the distance. But if you rely only on sight, especially in a...

ARDC and Open Ecoacoustics are bridging the digital divide, helping researchers process large datasets for biodiversity monitoring.

This webinar introduces an approach to building ecoacoustic recognisers by combining the strengths of Ecosounds and Google Perch

Small microphone arrays and sound-source localisation algorithms are increasingly prevalent in the passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) of ecosystems. These technologies enable analysis of natural so...

HYBRID workshop, Come learn about citizen science, ecoacoustic collaborations, and how you can help these magnificent birds.

YouTube video by Australian Research Data Commons - ARDC

Accessible and flexible implementation of three ecoacoustic indices that are less commonly available in existing R frameworks: Background Noise, Soundscape Power and Soundscape Saturation. The functions were design to accommodate a variety of sampling designs. Users can tailor calculations by specifying spectrogram time bin size, amplitude thresholds and normality tests. By simplifying computation and standardizing reproducible methods, the package aims to support ecoacoustics studies. For more details about the indices read Towsey (2014) &lt;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1016%2Fj.procs.2014.05.063" target="_top">doi:10.1016/j.procs.2014.05.063</a>&gt; and Burivalova (2017) &lt;<a href="https://doi.org/10.1111%2Fcobi.12968" target="_top">doi:10.1111/cobi.12968</a>&gt;.

Soil ecoacoustics is an emerging field and suite of tools that use sound and vibration to detect belowground biological activity. It offers a minimally invasive way to assess soil communities and ecosystem processes. Across biomes, we found that soil ecoacoustics is being used to detect organisms, quantify animal behaviour, monitor soil health, and assess restoration interventions. In this review, we show that ecoacoustic metrics reflect changes in soil fauna activity, disturbance impacts, and recovery trajectories. However, major challenges remain, including inconsistent terminology, limited understanding of sound propagation across soil types, difficulty separating biotic from abiotic signals, and a lack of standardised methods. Thus, we propose foundational standard operating procedures (SOPs) and identify how soil ecoacoustics could be integrated into global biodiversity monitoring frameworks.

PhD Project - Ecoacoustic monitoring of biodiversity in human-modified tropical forests at Manchester Metropolitan University, listed on FindAPhD.com

Ecoacoustic indices have been proposed as proxies for diversity measures such as species richness, however, their effectiveness remains a subject of o…