Identifying patterns of human and bird activities using bioacoustic data

In general, humans and animals often interact within the same environment at the same time. Human activities may disturb or affect some bird activities. Therefore, it is important to monitor and study the relationships between human and animal activities. This paper proposed a system able not only to automatically classify human and bird activities using bioacoustic data, but also to automatically summarize patterns of events over time. To perform automatic summarization of acoustic events, a frequency–duration graph (FDG) framework was proposed to summarize the patterns of human and bird activities. This system first performs data pre-processing work on raw bioacoustic data and then applies a support vector machine (SVM) model and a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) model to classify human and bird chirping activities before using the FDG framework to summarize results. The SVM model achieved 98% accuracy on average and the MLP model achieved 98% accuracy on average across several day-long recordings. Three case studies with real data show that the FDG framework correctly determined the patterns of human and bird activities over time and provided both statistical and graphical insight into the relationships between these two events

Rapid scanning of spectrograms for efficient identification of bioacoustic events in big data

Acoustic sensing is a promising approach to scaling faunal biodiversity monitoring. Scaling the analysis of audio collected by acoustic sensors is a big data problem. Standard approaches for dealing with big acoustic data include automated recognition and crowd based analysis. Automatic methods are fast at processing but hard to rigorously design, whilst manual methods are accurate but slow at processing. In particular, manual methods of acoustic data analysis are constrained by a 1:1 time relationship between the data and its analysts. This constraint is the inherent need to listen to the audio data. This paper demonstrates how the efficiency of crowd sourced sound analysis can be increased by an order of magnitude through the visual inspection of audio visualized as spectrograms. Experimental data suggests that an analysis speedup of 12× is obtainable for suitable types of acoustic analysis, given that only spectrograms are shown

Avian responses to fire regimes in montane dry sclerophyll forests of south-eastern Australia

Wildfires are becoming larger and more frequent in forests under climate change, with corresponding increases in area burnt recently and at high-severity. Australian fire regimes are changing rapidly, but the implications for fauna are poorly understood. The first of two overarching aims of this research was to increase understanding of the mechanisms and processes that underpin avian responses to fire regimes in montane dry sclerophyll forests of south-eastern Australia. The second was to investigate the implications of altered fire regimes for birds through evaluation of their responses where fire activity is currently high