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

近二十年来，声学监测在生态科学中的应用呈指数级增长。它已经被用来回答许多问题，包括检测环境中动物物种的存在或缺失，评估动物行为，识别生态压力源和非法活动。然而，目前的使用仅限于用固定数量的传感器覆盖相对较小的地理区域。动物携带的基于gps的位置跟踪器与其他传感器配对是另一种广泛使用的工具，用于帮助野生动物保护和生态系统监测。由于捕获和项圈对野生动物来说是一件创伤性的事情，而且成本高昂，资源密集，因此需要多年的部署。给电池充电的机会非常有限，这使得声学监测等相对耗电的传感设备无法使用现有的跟踪项圈。A3EM项目的目的是设计一种动物自适应声学监测系统，以便对野生动物的环境和行为进行长期、实时的观察。动物传播的声学监测将是一种新的工具，可以为生物多样性丧失提供新的见解，这是我们这个时代一个严重但未得到重视的问题。将声音监测与位置跟踪项圈相结合，将使全新的应用程序成为可能，这些应用程序将有助于人口普查和监测受威胁和濒危物种，探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，等等。所有数据、硬件设计和软件源代码都将发布到公共领域，使跟踪项圈制造商能够将该技术纳入其产品中。A3EM构成了一个复杂的网络物理架构，涉及人类、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。这种间歇性连接的CPS，其功率预算比典型的低一个数量级，需要具有高度自治和适应物理环境的新方法。A3EM将采用监督式和半监督式嵌入式机器学习的独特组合，在给定环境中识别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共享知识和数据，并优化存储和通信管理，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，稀有物种鉴定和人类对动物行为的影响研究。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.