Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: A3EM: Animal-borne Adaptive Acoustic Environmental Monitoring

在过去的二十年里，声学监测在生态科学中的应用呈指数级增长。它已被用来回答许多问题，包括检测环境中动物物种的存在或不存在，评估动物行为，以及识别生态应激源和非法活动。然而，目前的用途仅限于覆盖相对较小的地理区域和固定数量的传感器。基于动物的GPS定位追踪器与其他传感器配合使用，是帮助野生动物保护和生态系统监测的另一种广泛使用的工具。由于捕获和圈养野生动物对它们来说是一件痛苦的事情，而且成本高昂，资源密集型，因此需要多年的部署。为电池充电的机会非常有限，这使得相对耗电的传感，如声学监测，无法达到现有的跟踪环。A3EM项目的目标是设计一种动物携带的自适应声学监测系统，以便能够长期、实时地观察野生动物的环境和行为。动物携带的声学监测将是一种新的工具，可能会为生物多样性丧失提供新的见解，生物多样性丧失是我们这个时代一个严重但被忽视的问题。将声学监测与位置跟踪项圈相结合，将实现全新的应用，这些应用将促进对受威胁和濒危物种的普查收集和监测，检测非洲大象或阿拉斯加驯鹿的偷猎者，以及评估采矿和伐木对野生动物的影响等。所有数据、硬件设计和软件源代码都将公开，使跟踪项圈制造商能够将该技术纳入他们的产品中。A3EM构成了一个复杂的网络物理架构，涉及人、动物、分布式传感设备、智能环境监测代理以及有限的电力和网络连接。这种断断续续连接的CPS，其功率预算比典型的低一个数量级，需要具有高度自主性和对物理环境的适应的新方法。A3EM将采用监督和半监督嵌入式机器学习的独特组合，以识别给定环境中新的和未探索的事件类别，动态控制和调整与数据采集和存储相关的参数，在分布式传感设备之间机会主义地共享知识和数据，并优化存储和通信的管理，以最大限度地减少资源需求。这些方法将通过创建可穿戴的声学监测系统进行评估，该系统用于支持生态应用，如加强野生动物保护、稀有物种识别和人类对动物行为的影响研究。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The application of acoustic monitoring in ecological sciences has grown exponentially in the last two decades. It has been used to answer many questions, including detecting the presence or absence of animal species in an environment, evaluating animal behavior, and identifying ecological stressors and illegal activities. However, current uses are limited to the coverage of relatively small geographic areas with a fixed number of sensors. Animal-borne GPS-based location trackers paired with other sensors are another widely used tool in aiding wildlife conservation and ecosystem monitoring. Since capturing and collaring wild animals is a traumatic event for them, as well as being expensive and resource-intensive, multiyear deployments are required. There are severely limited opportunities to recharge batteries making relatively power-hungry sensing, such as acoustic monitoring, out of reach for existing tracking collars. The aim of the A3EM project is to devise an animal-borne adaptive acoustic monitoring system to enable long-term, real-time observation of the environment and behavior of wildlife. Animal-borne acoustic monitoring will be a novel tool that may provide new insights into biodiversity loss, a severe but underappreciated problem of our time. Combining acoustic monitoring with location tracking collars will enable entirely new applications that will facilitate census gathering and monitoring of threatened and endangered species, detecting poachers of elephants in Africa or caribou in Alaska, and evaluating the effects of mining and logging on wildlife, among many others. All data, hardware designs, and software source code will be released to the public domain, enabling tracking collar manufacturers to include the technology within their products.A3EM constitutes a complex cyber-physical architecture involving humans, animals, distributed sensing devices, intelligent environmental monitoring agents, and limited power and network connectivity. This intermittently connected CPS, with a power budget an order of magnitude lower than typical, calls for novel approaches with a high level of autonomy and adaptation to the physical environment. A3EM will employ a unique combination of supervised and semi-supervised embedded machine learning to identify new and unexplored event classes in a given environment, dynamically control and adjust parameters related to data acquisition and storage, opportunistically share knowledge and data between distributed sensing devices, and optimize the management of storage and communication to minimize resource needs. These methods will be evaluated through the creation of a wearable acoustic monitoring system used to support ecological applications such as enhanced wildlife protection, rare species identification, and human impact studies on animal behavior.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.