Here are a few excerpts from the Association for Advancing Participatory Sciences (AAPS; formerly the Citizen Science Association) January 2025 newsletter (received via email),
AI and the Future of Citizen Science: event and special collection
WEBINAR: Thursday, February 6 [2025], 12pm US Eastern Time
A conversation with editors and leaders
In December we announced a new special collection on the Future of Artificial Intelligence and Citizen Science. This open-access special collection of 12 papers explores the potential of AI coupled with citizen science in accelerating data processing, expanding project reach, enhancing data quality, and broadening engagement opportunities.
To help orient you to the themes covered in the special collection, issue editors Lucy Fortson, Kevin Crowston, Laure Kloetzer, and Marisa Ponti will join us for a special conversation with Marc Kuchner, Citizen Science Officer, NASA, February 6, 12pm ET. This event will go beyond a recap of papers presented in the special collection, and invite panelists to share their thoughts and perspectives on ethical considerations, challenges, and future directions.
Call for Abstracts (closing soon): Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums
A call for abstracts is open for a forthcoming Special Collection in Citizen Science: Theory and Practice which will explore galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAM) participatory science efforts in order to support and empower the global field of participatory sciences. By sharing innovative practices and advancing theories, this collection will contribute to the continued refinement of best practices in these vital ‘third spaces’ and beyond. Issue overview and submission deadlines and logistics are available on the AAPS website. Abstracts accepted through 28 February 2025.
More events from the AAPS-partnered 2025 NASA Cit Sci Leaders Series:
Artificial Intelligence, Open Data, Funding, and more
The NASA Citizen Science Leaders Series is a professional learning service for those leading, hoping to lead, or wanting to learn more about NASA Citizen Science. The following events are open to the public.
Artificial Intelligence: This event, in collaboration with AAPS, features the issue editors from the new Special Collection sharing their key takeaways and hot takes on the topic.Register here. [February 6, 2025] Noon ET start.
Artificial Intelligence in practice: On February 20 [2025] the Zooniverse’s Dr. Laura Trouille will join us to share new functionality of the Zooniverse platform, including ways that Zooniverse projects are adjusting to work with new Artificial Intelligence/ machine learning tools. Register here.Noon ET start.
Open Data Management plans and long-term archives of citizen science project data: On March 6 [2025] Dr. Steven Crawford who leads NASA’s Open Science work will discuss these issues and more. Register here.3 pm ET start.
Funding: On March 13 [2025] explore landscape of different NASA proposal calls and hear insights on how solicitations are written, how proposals are reviewed, and how funding is handled. Register here.3 pm ET start.
…
Members in AAPS Connect can get instant notices when opportunities are posted, often directly from the source. Interested in direct networking with field leaders and being the first to hear of important jobs, grants, and more? Become a member of AAPS (tiered pricing costs as little as $0).
Jobs:
iNaturalist is hiring a Senior Communications Manager responsible for delivering engaging, visual communications about iNaturalist to reach and engage new audiences. Full details here.
Reef Environmental Education Foundation (REEF) is hiring an Education coordinator to support activities related to REEF Ocean Explorers and Discovery programming, including K-12 and lifelong learning education and public outreach programs. Full details available here.
Cornell Lab of Ornithology is hiring an Extension Associate to as the thought leader and team leader for Youth and Community Engagement for the Lab both nationally and in international settings, with key responsibilities in strategic planning, partnership development, implementation, and evaluation of impact. Full details available here.
The Cornell University Lab of Ornithology’s sound recognition feature in its Merlin birding app(lication) can answer that question for you according to a July 14, 2021 article by Steven Melendez for Fast Company (Note: Links have been removed),
The lab recently upgraded its Merlin smartphone app, designed for both new and experienced birdwatchers. It now features an AI-infused “Sound ID” feature that can capture bird sounds and compare them to crowdsourced samples to figure out just what bird is making that sound. … people have used it to identify more than 1 million birds. New user counts are also up 58% since the two weeks before launch, and up 44% over the same period last year, according to Drew Weber, Merlin’s project coordinator.
…
Even when it’s listening to bird sounds, the app still relies on recent advances in image recognition, says project research engineer Grant Van Horn. …, it actually transforms the sound into a visual graph called a spectrogram, similar to what you might see in an audio editing program. Then, it analyzes that spectrogram to look for similarities to known bird calls, which come from the Cornell Lab’s eBird citizen science project.
There’s more detail about Merlin in Marc Devokaitis’ June 23, 2021 article for the Cornell Chronicle,
… Merlin can recognize the sounds of more than 400 species from the U.S. and Canada, with that number set to expand rapidly in future updates.
As Merlin listens, it uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology to identify each species, displaying in real time a list and photos of the birds that are singing or calling.
Automatic song ID has been a dream for decades, but analyzing sound has always been extremely difficult. The breakthrough came when researchers, including Merlin lead researcher Grant Van Horn, began treating the sounds as images and applying new and powerful image classification algorithms like the ones that already power Merlin’s Photo ID feature.
“Each sound recording a user makes gets converted from a waveform to a spectrogram – a way to visualize the amplitude [volume], frequency [pitch] and duration of the sound,” Van Horn said. “So just like Merlin can identify a picture of a bird, it can now use this picture of a bird’s sound to make an ID.”
Merlin’s pioneering approach to sound identification is powered by tens of thousands of citizen scientists who contributed their bird observations and sound recordings to eBird, the Cornell Lab’s global database.
“Thousands of sound recordings train Merlin to recognize each bird species, and more than a billion bird observations in eBird tell Merlin which birds are likely to be present at a particular place and time,” said Drew Weber, Merlin project coordinator. “Having this incredibly robust bird dataset – and feeding that into faster and more powerful machine-learning tools – enables Merlin to identify birds by sound now, when doing so seemed like a daunting challenge just a few years ago.”
…
The Merlin Bird ID app with the new Sound ID feature is available for free on iOS and Android devices. Click here to download the Merlin Bird ID app and follow the prompts. If you already have Merlin installed on your phone, tap “Get Sound ID.”
Do take a look at Devokaitis’ June 23, 2021 article for more about how the Merlin app provides four ways to identify birds.
For anyone who likes to listen to the news, there’s an August 26, 2021 podcast (The Warblers by Birds Canada) featuring Drew Weber, Merlin project coordinator, and Jody Allair, Birds Canada Director of Community Engagement, discussing Merlin,
It’s a dream come true – there’s finally an app for identifying bird sounds. In the next episode of The Warblers podcast, we’ll explore the Merlin Bird ID app’s new Sound ID feature and how artificial intelligence is redefining birding. We talk with Drew Weber and Jody Allair and go deep into the implications and opportunities that this technology will bring for birds, and new as well as experienced birders.
The Warblers is hosted by Andrea Gress and Andrés Jiménez.
This September 13, 2021 news item about sound recordings taken in a rainforest (on phys.org) is downright fascinating,
More than a million hours of sound recordings are available from the Elephant Listening Project (ELP) in the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology—a rainforest residing in the cloud.
ELP researchers, in collaboration with the Wildlife Conservation Society, use remote recording units to capture the entire soundscape of a Congolese rainforest. Their targets are vocalizations from endangered African forest elephants, but they also capture tropical parrots shrieking, chimps chattering and rainfall spattering on leaves to the beat of grumbling thunder.
…
For someone who suffers from acrophobia (fear of heights), this is a disturbing picture (how tall is that tree? is the rope reinforced? who or what is holding him up? where is the photographer perched?),
Frelcia Bambi is a member of the Congolese team that deploys sound recorders in the rainforest and analyzes the data. Photo by Sebastien Assoignons, courtesy of the Wildlife Conservation Society.
“Scientists can use these soundscapes to monitor biodiversity,” said ELP director Peter Wrege. “You could measure overall sound levels before, during and after logging operations, for example. Or hone in on certain frequencies where insects may vocalize. Sound is increasingly being used as a conservation tool, especially for establishing the presence or absence of a species.”
For the past four years, 50 tree-mounted recording units have been collecting data continuously, covering a region that encompasses old logging sites, recent logging sites and part of the Nouabalé-Ndoki National Park in the Republic of the Congo. The sensors sometimes capture the booming guns of poachers, alerting rangers who then head out to track down the illegal activity.
But everyday nature lovers can tune in rainforest sounds, too.
“We’ve had requests to use some of the files for meditation or for yoga,” Wrege said. “It is very soothing to listen to rainforest sounds—you hear the sounds of insects, birds, frogs, chimps, wind and rain all blended together.”
But, as Wrege and others have learned, big data can also be a big problem. The Sounds of Central African Landscapes recordings would gobble up nearly 100 terabytes of computer space, and ELP takes in another eight terabytes every four months. But now, Amazon Web Services is storing the jungle sounds for free under its Open Data Sponsorship Program, which preserves valuable scientific data for public use.
This makes it possible for Wrege to share the jungle sounds and easier for users to analyze them with Amazon tools so they don’t have to move the massive files or try to download them.
Searching for individual species amid the wealth of data is a bit more daunting. ELP uses computer algorithms to search through the recordings for elephant sounds. Wrege has created a detector for the sounds of gorillas beating their chests. There are software platforms that help users create detectors for specific sounds, including Raven Pro 1.6, created by the Cornell Lab’s bioacoustics engineers. Wrege says the next iteration, Raven 2.0, will make this process even easier.
Wrege is also eyeing future educational uses for the recordings which he says could help train in-country biologists to not only collect the data but do the analyses. This is gradually happening now in the Republic of the Congo—ELP’s team of Congolese researchers does all the analysis for gunshot detection, though the elephant analyses are still done at ELP.
“We could use these recordings for internships and student training in Congo and other countries where we work, such as Gabon,” Wrege said. “We can excite young people about conservation in Central Africa. It would be a huge benefit to everyone living there.”
To listen or download clips from Sounds of the Central African Landscape, go to ELP’s data page on Amazon Web Services. You’ll need to create an account with AWS (choose the free option). Then sign in with your username and password. Click on the “recordings” item in the list you see, then “wav/” on the next page. From there you can click on any item in the list to play or download clips that are each 1.3 GB and 24 hours long.
Scientists looking to use sounds for research and analysis should start here.
World Conservation Society Forest Elephant Congo [downloaded from https://congo.wcs.org/Wildlife/Forest-Elephant.aspx]
What follows may be a little cynical but I can’t help noticing that this worthwhile and fascinating project will result in more personal and/or professional data for Amazon since you have to sign up even if all you’re doing is reading or listening to a few files that they’ve made available for the general public. In a sense, Amazon gets ‘paid’ when you give up an email address to them. Plus, Amazon gets to look like a good world citizen.
Let’s hope something greater than one company’s reputation as a world citizen comes out of this.
This posting started out with two items and then, it became more. If you’re interested in marine bioacoustics especially the work that’s been announced in the last four months, read on.
Fish songs
This item is about how fish sounds (songs) signify successful coral reef restoration got coverage on BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) and elsewhere. This video is courtesy of the Guardian Newspaper,
Newly discovered fish songs demonstrate reef restoration success
Whoops, croaks, growls, raspberries and foghorns are among the sounds that demonstrate the success of a coral reef restoration project.
Thousands of square metres of coral are being grown on previously destroyed reefs in Indonesia, but previously it was unclear whether these new corals would revive the entire reef ecosystem.
Now a new study, led by researchers from the University of Exeter and the University of Bristol, finds a heathy, diverse soundscape on the restored reefs.
These sounds – many of which have never been recorded before – can be used alongside visual observations to monitor these vital ecosystems.
“Restoration projects can be successful at growing coral, but that’s only part of the ecosystem,” said lead author Dr Tim Lamont, of the University of Exeter and the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Project, which is restoring the reefs in central Indonesia.
“This study provides exciting evidence that restoration really works for the other reef creatures too – by listening to the reefs, we’ve documented the return of a diverse range of animals.”
Professor Steve Simpson, from the University of Bristol, added: “Some of the sounds we recorded are really bizarre, and new to us as scientists.
“We have a lot still to learn about what they all mean and the animals that are making them. But for now, it’s amazing to be able to hear the ecosystem come back to life.”
The soundscapes of the restored reefs are not identical to those of existing healthy reefs – but the diversity of sounds is similar, suggesting a healthy and functioning ecosystem.
There were significantly more fish sounds recorded on both healthy and restored reefs than on degraded reefs.
This study used acoustic recordings taken in 2018 and 2019 as part of the monitoring programme for the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Project.
The results are positive for the project’s approach, in which hexagonal metal frames called ‘Reef Stars’ are seeded with coral and laid over a large area. The Reef Stars stabilise loose rubble and kickstart rapid coral growth, leading to the revival of the wider ecosystem.
Mochyudho Prasetya, of the Mars Coral Reef Restoration Project, said: “We have been restoring and monitoring these reefs here in Indonesia for many years. Now it is amazing to see more and more evidence that our work is helping the reefs come back to life.”
Professor David Smith, Chief Marine Scientist for Mars Incorporated, added: “When the soundscape comes back like this, the reef has a better chance of becoming self-sustaining because those sounds attract more animals that maintain and diversify reef populations.”
Asked about the multiple threats facing coral reefs, including climate change and water pollution, Dr Lamont said: “If we don’t address these wider problems, conditions for reefs will get more and more hostile, and eventually restoration will become impossible.
“Our study shows that reef restoration can really work, but it’s only part of a solution that must also include rapid action on climate change and other threats to reefs worldwide.”
The study was partly funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
The sound of recovery: Coral reef restoration success is detectable in the soundscape by Timothy A. C. Lamont, Ben Williams, Lucille Chapuis, Mochyudho E. Prasetya, Marie J. Seraphim, Harry R. Harding, Eleanor B. May, Noel Janetski, Jamaluddin Jompa, David J. Smith, Andrew N. Radford, Stephen D. Simpson. Journal of Applied Ecology DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.14089 First published: 07 December 2021
There is one item here. This research from Cornell University also features the sounds fish make. It’s no surprise given the attention being given to sound that the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is involved. In addition to the lab’s main focus, birds, many other animal sounds are gathered too.
There’s a whole lot of talking going on beneath the waves. A new study from Cornell University finds that fish are far more likely to communicate with sound than generally thought—and some fish have been doing this for at least 155 million years. These findings were just published in the journal Ichthyology & Herpetology.
“We’ve known for a long time that some fish make sounds,” said lead author Aaron Rice, a researcher at the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology [emphasis mine]. “But fish sounds were always perceived as rare oddities. We wanted to know if these were one-offs or if there was a broader pattern for acoustic communication in fishes.”
The authors looked at a branch of fishes called the ray-finned fishes. These are vertebrates (having a backbone) that comprise 99% of the world’s known species of fishes. They found 175 families that contain two-thirds of fish species that do, or are likely to, communicate with sound. By examining the fish family tree, study authors found that sound was so important, it evolved at least 33 separate times over millions of years.
“Thanks to decades of basic research on the evolutionary relationships of fishes, we can now explore many questions about how different functions and behaviors evolved in the approximately 35,000 known species of fishes,” said co-author William E. Bemis ’76, Cornell professor of ecology and evolutionary biology in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. “We’re getting away from a strictly human-centric way of thinking. What we learn could give us some insight on the drivers of sound communication and how it continues to evolve.”
The scientists used three sources of information: existing recordings and scientific papers describing fish sounds; the known anatomy of a fish—whether they have the right tools for making sounds, such as certain bones, an air bladder, and sound-specific muscles; and references in 19th century literature before underwater microphones were invented.
“Sound communication is often overlooked within fishes, yet they make up more than half of all living vertebrate species,” said Andrew Bass, co-lead author and the Horace White Professor of Neurobiology and Behavior in the College of Arts and Sciences. “They’ve probably been overlooked because fishes are not easily heard or seen, and the science of underwater acoustic communication has primarily focused on whales and dolphins. But fishes have voices, too!”
What are the fish talking about? Pretty much the same things we all talk about—sex and food. Rice says the fish are either trying to attract a mate, defend a food source or territory, or let others know where they are. Even some of the common names for fish are based on the sounds they make, such as grunts, croakers, hog fish, squeaking catfish, trumpeters, and many more.
Rice intends to keep tracking the discovery of sound in fish species and add them to his growing database (see supplemental material, Table S1)—a project he began 20 years ago with study co-authors Ingrid Kaatz ’85, MS ’92, and Philip Lobel, a professor of biology at Boston University. Their collaboration has continued and expanded since Rice came to Cornell.
“This introduces sound communication to so many more groups than we ever thought,” said Rice. “Fish do everything. They breathe air, they fly, they eat anything and everything—at this point, nothing would surprise me about fishes and the sounds that they can make.”
The research was partly funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, the Tontogany Creek Fund, and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology.
I’ve embedded one of the audio files, Oyster Toadfish (William Tavolga) here,
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Evolutionary Patterns in Sound Production across Fishes by Aaron N. Rice, Stacy C. Farina, Andrea J. Makowski, Ingrid M. Kaatz, Phillip S. Lobel, William E. Bemis, Andrew H. Bass. Ichthyology & Herpetology, 110(1):1-12 (2022) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1643/i2020172 20 January 2022
This paper is open access.
Marine sound libraries
Thanks to Aly Laube’s March 2, 2022 article on the DailyHive.com, I learned of Kieran Cox’s work at the University of Victoria and FishSounds (Note: Links have been removed),
Fish have conversations and a group of researchers made a website to document them.
…
It’s so much fun to peruse and probably the good news you need. Listen to a Bocon toadfish “boop” or this sablefish tick, which is slightly creepier, but still pretty cool. This streaked gurnard can growl, and this grumpy Atlantic cod can grunt.
…
The technical term for “fishy conversations” is “marine bioacoustics,” which is what Kieran Cox specializes in. They can be used to track, monitor, and learn more about aquatic wildlife.
The doctor of marine biology at the University of Victoria co-authored an article about fish sounds in Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries called “A Quantitative Inventory of Global Soniferous Fish Diversity.”
It presents findings from his process, helping create FishSounds.net. He and his team looked over over 3,000 documents from 834 studies to put together the library of 989 fish species.
Fascinating soundscapes exist beneath rivers, lakes and oceans. An unexpected sound source are fish making their own unique and entertaining noise from guttural grunts to high-pitched squeals. Underwater noise is a vital part of marine ecosystems, and thanks to almost 150 years of researchers documenting those sounds we know hundreds of fish species contribute their distinctive sounds. Although fish are the largest and most diverse group of sound-producing vertebrates in water, there was no record of which fish species make sound and the sounds they produce. For the very first time, there is now a digital place where that data can be freely accessed or contributed to, an online repository, a global inventory of fish sounds.
Kieran Cox co-authored the published article about fish sounds and their value in Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries while completing his Ph.D in marine biology at the University of Victoria. Cox recently began a Liber Ero post-doctoral collaboration with Francis Juanes that aims to integrate marine bioacoustics into the conservation of Canada’s oceans. Liber Ero program is devoted to promoting applied and evidence-based conservation in Canada.
The international group of researchers includes UVic, the University of Florida, Universidade de São Paulo, and Marine Environmental Research Infrastructure for Data Integration and Application Network (MERIDIAN) [emphasis mine] have launched the first ever, dedicated website focused on fish and their sounds: FishSounds.net. …
According to Cox, “This data is absolutely critical to our efforts. Without it, we were having a one-sided conversation about how noise impacts marine life. Now we can better understand the contributions fish make to soundscapes and examine which species may be most impacted by noise pollution.” Cox, an avid scuba diver, remembers his first dive when the distinct sound of parrotfish eating coral resonated over the reef, “It’s thrilling to know we are now archiving vital ecological information and making it freely available to the public, I feel like my younger self would be very proud of this effort.” …
Cows moo. Wolves howl. Birds tweet. And fish, it turns out, make all sorts of ruckus.
“People are often surprised to learn that fish make sounds,” said Audrey Looby, a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida. “But you could make the case that they are as important for understanding fish as bird sounds are for studying birds.”
The sounds of many animals are well documented. Go online, and you’ll find plenty of resources for bird calls and whale songs. However, a global library for fish sounds used to be unheard of.
That’s why Looby, University of Victoria collaborator Kieran Cox and an international team of researchers created FishSounds.net, the first online, interactive fish sounds repository of its kind.
…
“There’s no standard system yet for naming fish sounds, so our project uses the sound names researchers have come up with,” Looby said. “And who doesn’t love a fish that boops?”
The library’s creators hope to add a feature that will allow people to submit their own fish sound recordings. Other interactive features, such as a world map with clickable fish sound data points, are also in the works.
Fish make sound in many ways. Some, like the toadfish, have evolved organs or other structures in their bodies that produce what scientists call active sounds. Other fish produce incidental or passive sounds, like chewing or splashing, but even passive sounds can still convey information.
Scientists think fish evolved to make sound because sound is an effective way to communicate underwater. Sound travels faster under water than it does through air, and in low visibility settings, it ensures the message still reaches an audience.
“Fish sounds contain a lot of important information,” said Looby, who is pursuing a doctorate in fisheries and aquatic sciences at the UF/IFAS College of Agricultural and Life Sciences. “Fish may communicate about territory, predators, food and reproduction. And when we can match fish sounds to fish species, their sounds are a kind of calling card that can tell us what kinds of fish are in an area and what they are doing.”
Knowing the location and movements of fish species is critical for environmental monitoring, fisheries management and conservation efforts. In the future, marine, estuarine or freshwater ecologists could use hydrophones — special underwater microphones — to gather data on fish species’ whereabouts. But first, they will need to be able to identify which fish they are hearing, and that’s where the fish sounds database can assist.
FishSounds.net emerged from the research team’s efforts to gather and review the existing scientific literature on fish sounds. An article synthesizing that literature has just been published in Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries.
In the article, the researchers reviewed scientific reports of fish sounds going back almost 150 years. They found that a little under a thousand fish species are known to make active sounds, and several hundred species were studied for their passive sounds. However, these are probably both underestimates, Cox explained.
…
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
A quantitative inventory of global soniferous fish diversity by Audrey Looby, Kieran Cox, Santiago Bravo, Rodney Rountree, Francis Juanes, Laura K. Reynolds & Charles W. Martin. Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries (2022) DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11160-022-09702-1 Published 18 February 2022
This paper is behind a paywall.
Finally, there’s GLUBS. A comprehensive February 27, 2022 Rockefeller University news release on EurekAlert announces a proposal for the Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds (GLUBS), Note 1: Links have been removed; Note 2: If you’re interested in the topic, I recommend reading either the original February 27, 2022 Rockefeller University news release with its numerous embedded images, audio files, and links to marine audio libraries,
Of the roughly 250,000 known marine species, scientists think all ~126 marine mammals emit sounds – the ‘thwop’, ‘muah’, and ‘boop’s of a humpback whale, for example, or the boing of a minke whale. Audible too are at least 100 invertebrates, 1,000 of the world’s 34,000 known fish species, and likely many thousands more.
Now a team of 17 experts from nine countries has set a goal [emphasis mine] of gathering on a single platform huge collections of aquatic life’s tell-tale sounds, and expanding it using new enabling technologies – from highly sophisticated ocean hydrophones and artificial intelligence learning systems to phone apps and underwater GoPros used by citizen scientists.
The Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds, “GLUBS,” will underpin a novel non-invasive, affordable way for scientists to listen in on life in marine, brackish and freshwaters, monitor its changing diversity, distribution and abundance, and identify new species. Using the acoustic properties of underwater soundscapes can also characterize an ecosystem’s type and condition.
…
“A database of unidentified sounds is, in some ways, as important as one for known sources,” the scientists say. “As the field progresses, new unidentified sounds will be collected, and more unidentified sounds can be matched to species.”
This can be “particularly important for high-biodiversity systems such as coral reefs, where even a short recording can pick up multiple animal sounds.”
Existing libraries of undersea sounds (several of which are listed with hyperlinks below) “often focus on species of interest that are targeted by the host institute’s researchers,” the paper says, and several are nationally-focussed. Few libraries identify what is missing from their catalogs, which the proposed global library would.
“A global reference library of underwater biological sounds would increase the ability for more researchers in more locations to broaden the number of species assessed within their datasets and to identify sounds they personally do not recognize,” the paper says.
…
The scientists note that listening to the sea has revealed great whales swimming in unexpected places, new species and new sounds.
With sound, “biologically important areas can be mapped; spawning grounds, essential fish habitat, and migration pathways can be delineated…These and other questions can be queried on broader scales if we have a global catalog of sounds.”
Meanwhile, comparing sounds from a single species across broad areas and times helps understand their diversity and evolution.
Numerous marine animals are cosmopolitan, the paper says, “either as wide-roaming individuals, such as the great whales, or as broadly distributed species, such as many fishes.”
Fin whale calls, for example, can differ among populations in the Northern and Southern hemispheres, and over seasons, whereas the call of pilot whales are similar worldwide, even though their home ranges do not (or no longer) cross the equator.
Some fishes even seem to develop geographic ‘dialects’ or completely different signal structures among regions, several of which evolve over time.
Madagascar’s skunk anemonefish … , for example, produces different agonistic (fight-related) sounds than those in Indonesia, while differences in the song of humpback whales have been observed across ocean basins.
…
Phone apps, underwater GoPros and citizen science
Much like BirdNet and FrogID, a library of underwater biological sounds and automated detection algorithms would be useful not only for the scientific, industry and marine management communities but also for users with a general interest.
“Acoustic technology has reached the stage where a hydrophone can be connected to a mobile phone so people can listen to fishes and whales in the rivers and seas around them. Therefore, sound libraries are becoming invaluable to citizen scientists and the general public,” the paper adds.
And citizen scientists could be of great help to the library by uploading the results of, for example, the River Listening app (www.riverlistening.com), which encourages the public to listen to and record fish sounds in rivers and coastal waters.
Low-cost hydrophones and recording systems (such as the Hydromoth) are increasingly available and waterproof recreational recording systems (such as GoPros) can also collect underwater biological sounds.
…
Here’s a link to and a citation for the paper,
Sounding the Call for a Global Library of Underwater Biological Sounds by Miles J. G. Parsons, Tzu-Hao Lin, T. Aran Mooney, Christine Erbe, Francis Juanes, Marc Lammers, Songhai Li, Simon Linke, Audrey Looby, Sophie L. Nedelec, Ilse Van Opzeeland, Craig Radford, Aaron N. Rice, Laela Sayigh, Jenni Stanley, Edward Urban and Lucia Di Iorio. Front. Ecol. Evol., 08 February 2022 DOI: https://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2022.810156 Published: 08 February 2022.
Indris located on Madagascar. Credit: Cornell University
What a face! And, it introduces you to the latest from Cornell University’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences’ (CALS), from a February 26, 2018 news item on phys.org,
Musicians have long drawn inspiration from nature, but a new online game is taking that connection one step further. “Beastbox” takes sound clips from real wild animals, transforms them into loops, and allows users to mix and match them into an endless variety of beats, breaks and drops. Along the way, players learn about the animals and the ecosystems they belong to.
The free game is the result of a collaboration among the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Cornell Hip Hop Collection and Ben Mirin, a sound artist and beatboxer whose career as a “wildlife DJ” inspired the project.
“‘BeastBox’ is a surprise mashup brought to you by scientists, musicians, designers, animators and coders,” says Mya Thompson, leader of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Bird Academy project. “It’s dedicated to the idea that we could all use a few minutes to appreciate our musical planet. When I first met Ben Mirin, I knew we could take his wildlife DJ concept to a new level – and ‘BeastBox’ is what came out.”
By bringing animals from the same ecosystem together on the virtual stage, players can unlock “Beastmode” and control the moves of animal characters as they dance to Mirin’s music. Each bonus track is created exclusively from sounds recorded in six ecosystems including the Madagascar rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef and the Sonoran desert. Fun for all ages, “BeastBox” celebrates the musicality and biodiversity of our planet and encourages fans of music to become fans of wildlife.
“BeastBox” highlights two of Cornell’s world-renowned collections: The Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s Macaulay Library and the Cornell Hip Hop Collection. The Macaulay Library is the world’s premier scientific archive of natural history audio, video and photographs. Many of the sounds players encounter in the game are archived in the library. Players who complete at least one ecosystem puzzle win the opportunity to download 20 wild animal sounds from the Macaulay Library collection.
Founded in 2007, Cornell’s Hip Hop Collection is the largest research archive on hip-hop culture in the world and is part of Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. “BeastBox” players are encouraged to browse the archive to better understand the cultural roots of beatboxing and hip-hop.
Here’s an April 11, 2015 TEDxNYU (New York University) talk by Ben Mirin (published on YouTube June 5, 2017),