New Sound Recording Technology Monitors Calls of Tropical Wildlife

Dense rainforests or thick underbrush can house hundreds of species. Yet it's difficult for scientists to pick out exactly how many there are--or even what types are present. That's why they've designed some new technology to help. Researchers have created a cyberinfrastructure that records the sounds of the wild in remote locations and then picks out exactly which species are present in the area. This new method could have huge implications for species preservation and habitat conservation.

Tropical rainforests are rapidly disappearing as deforestation occurs. This, in turn, is having major impacts on most tropical species. Yet it's hard to know exactly how many individuals of a population are left, or what sites have been abandoned completely. This new technology, though, could help solve this issue.

In order to create the new sound system, researchers developed hardware and software to collect, process and analyze audio recording in real-time. The hardware records 144 one-minute recordings per day in remote sites and then sends them to a base station. There, the recordings are then processed and made available to the world through the internet in less than a minute. This means that anyone with an internet connection can view and listen to more than one million recordings from the various sites.

What about species identification? The researchers developed a web application with the tools that a user needs to train the software to automate species identification.  In addition, this new application provides other tools for measuring the accuracy and precision of the model. Once the biologist has developed a reliable model, the computer can process more than 100,000 recordings in less than an hour, providing information on species presence and absence.

"To understand the impacts of deforestation and climate change, we need reliable long-term data on the fauna from around the world," said Mitchell Aide, one of the researchers, in a news release. "Traditional sampling methodology, sending biologists to the field, is expensive and often results in incomplete and limited data sets because it is impossible to maintain biologists in the field 24 hours a day throughout the year, and it is impossible to clone expert field biologists, so that they can monitor various sites simultaneously."

That's not to say that the researchers are planning to replace biologists. Instead, they hope that this new tool will help scientists better analyze areas that are hard to reach or are impossible to analyze for long amounts of time.

"Conserving and managing the biodiversity in the world is a major challenge for society, particularly in the tropics," said Aide in a news release. "We hope that the tools we have developed will allow researchers, students, managers and the public to better understand how these threats are impacting species, so that we can make informed conservation and management decisions."

The findings are published in the journal PeerJ.