I just signed up! Looking forward testing it with my out of range Austria datasets .

Greetings from Vienna,
Robin

Hi Robin, that's brilliant. I can see you in the system now. I'd be really interested in any feedback on the BTO Acoustic Pipeline when you come to test it  - via acoustic.pipeline@bto.org

Austria is out of supported range, but of bat species, I think that it's only Plecotus macrobullaris, which I know is very localised in Austria, is the only bat species that I have done very little work on. There are some larger gaps in coverage for small mammals and bush-crickets when these are recorded as 'by-catch' during bat surveys, but I hope that for e.g. shrew species, recordings will correctly be assign to a shrew shrew, and flagged with a warning that not all shrew species in Austria are covered.

All the best, Stuart

Could you explain your question a bit more? Are you asking about hardware or software for bioacoustics? If you go through this thread a lot of great platforms are referenced! I'm not sure if it's in this thread or not already, but Tessa Rhinehart developed a great compilation of bioacoustic analysis software - https://github.com/rhine3/audiomoth-guide/blob/master/resources/analysis-software.md

Thanks for your reply, I'm new to the bioacoustic world, and I was interested to know, how do you record on the field the bird sound (probably using audiomoth? a lot of people seems to speak about this equipment) and then how do you proceed you bird sound analysis when you come back at the office? i'm familiar with bird net app and was interested to know if they was a way to automatized it but simply hanging a phone on a "plastic box" in a tree a let it automatically detect the surrounding bird = Easy bird census.

Thank you, 

All the best

Antoine 

For passive acoustic monitoring, there are three major hardware types, each with their own pro's and con's- The SongMeter, from Wildlife Acoustics, the Swift, from Cornell Lab of Ornithology/Center for Conservation Bioacoustics and the AudioMoth, from Open Acoustic Devices.

In terms of software, I've used Kaleidoscope, RavenPro, and Arbimon for different things. For things like censusing, you'd need another statistical step through R, Python and different types of models to turn the acoustic data into estimates for abundance, range, distribution, etc.  There are a lot of emerging methods papers regarding this being released now - check out Ben Stevenson's work https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=oIsadHAAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=sra.

Hi Antoine--

It depends in part on what you are trying to do. There are different tools for trying to detect one specific species (ie an invasive or a species of particular conservation interest) vs identifying many species to get an idea of the vocal community vs trying to quantify aspects of the soundscape in general (ie, including non-bird sounds in your analysis). It sounds like you're trying mostly to do the second of those options, but I'd recommend trying to clarify your question/problem before starting to explore the tools to solve that problem, since all the tools have advantages and disadvantages.

Cheers

David

Hi Dtsavage,

So my goal is to detect invasive species progression/ dispersal and the relative change of "abundance" of native species. So problem 1 and 2 in your previous message.

My idea will be to arrange several sensors at legal interval on a latitude gradient and try to monitor bird species present at these different locations. Could give us an idea of some bird invasive species  capacity to spread on new territories and their limitation in terms of altitude and habitats.

Thank you.

Hi Antoine, did you know about our bioacoustic recorders? https://frontierlabs.com.au/ . They have the best sound recording quality and built in GPS. You can have a listen to Australia here https://data.acousticobservatory.org/projects/1 . The Australian Acoustic Observatory uses 400 of our Solar BARs across Australia and the recordings are published for anyone to use.

Unfortunately there isn't software to do an easy bird census. Do you  need to know every bird you can hear or just the presence of one species?

Best regards, Mark