Expand Bioacoustic Data Collection
Scaling data collection of animal sounds in California to improve conservation efforts for key species
The Latest
- Developed new AI models to detect species of ecological and cultural significance, including coyotes and frogs
- Launched Jupyter Bioacoustic: an open source toolkit for scientists to build bioacoustics pipelines
Our Impact
Soundhub
Soundhub is a remarkable web tool that identifies species using bioacoustic sound data (i.e. animal calls). Bioacoustic data is critical for understanding wildlife abundance and distribution, can signal changes in environmental health over time, and informs conservation decisionmaking. The tool can passively collect, sort, and classify terabytes of audio to detect species. This provides an exciting and time-saving approach to data collection at scale rather than relying on field observations.
We are partnering with the UC Berkeley Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF) and California Department of Fish and Wildlife to expand Soundhub so that it becomes the official home for all bioacoustic data across California, including the California Sentinel Site Network. These sites are in specific geographic areas where long-term, standardized monitoring and instrumentation is installed and maintained to accomplish state climate and biodiversity monitoring goals.
DSE's roles in this effort are to develop targeted AI models to identify vocalizations from frogs, birds, coyotes, and other species of interest, as well as anthropogenic sounds (i.e. vehicle noise) and natural environmental sounds (i.e. wind and rain). Simultaneously, we are helping to integrate Indigenous Data Sovereignty parameters to ensure the tool protects the privacy of and data from Indigenous users.
Species of Interest
Above: DSE is training AI models to detect key species within Soundhub. Clockwise from top left: close up of a barn owl looking at the camera, a coyote standing on red and beige shrubs, a gray wolf standing on river rocks, and wood frog on a fallen log.
Jupyter Bioacoustic
We also recently developed Jupyter Bioacoustic: new open source toolkit that provides modular tools for building bioacoustics pipelines within the Jupyter ecosystem. Developed as a flexible extension of Soundhub, Jupyter Bioacoustic addresses a key missing piece in bioacoustic workflows: its interface enables an entire analysis workflow in one place. It also allows those concerned with privacy (i.e. Indigenous partners) to run analyses locally without relying on external infrastructure. The tool is complete and entering user testing, with the end goal of making it broadly available to anyone working within the Jupyter ecosystem.
Future Vision
We are aiming to integrate our new AI models into Soundhub in the coming months. Moreover, we'll continue the Jupyter Bioacoustic user testing phase as we work towards the tool's broader release.
Partner Feedback
Thanks to Schmidt DSE's work on incorporating new sound identification models into the Wildlife Sound Hub, we will gain even more environmental information from the state’s acoustic monitoring efforts, and can more efficiently and effectively manage California’s diverse nature for the benefit of all.”
- Matthew Toenies, Senior Environmental Scientist, California Department of Fish and Wildlife
