HearTheSpecies: Using computer audition to understand the drivers of soundscape composition, and to predict parasitation rates based on vocalisations of bird species

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

HearTheSpecies is an interdisciplinary project of the Chair of Embedded Intelligence for Health Care and Wellbeing (EIHW) at the University of Augsburg and the Chair of Geobotany at the University of Freiburg (ALU-FR). The intensification of land use is one of the main causes of the current loss of biodiversity. In order to better understand and monitor the links between land use intensity and biodiversity loss, HearTheSpecies aims to harness the potential of a hitherto under-researched data pool: Audio. The impact of land use on the soundscape of a landscape manifests itself in different aspects and scales. Species loss of vocalising animal communities or changes in landscape structure and vegetation density alter the composition of biophony (sounds of wildlife), geophony (sounds of abiotic nature) and anthropophony (sounds caused by humans). On a much finer scale, land use can even affect the vocal characteristics of individual animals by influencing fitness and parasitisation rates. The established land use gradient within biodiversity exploratories provides an excellent research platform to investigate these relationships and thus establish AI-based autonomous acoustic monitoring workflows. Specifically, as part of HearTheSpecies, we aim to develop AI-based automatic diarisation and separation tools that enable coarse separation of biophony, anthropophony and geophony from interwoven soundscape recordings, and fine-grained detection and separation of species and specific abiotic sounds. To do this, we will annotate existing data from previous projects that collected audio recordings within the Biodiversity Exploratories to enable the training of AI algorithms, and collect new audio data in the joint multi-site experiments REX and FOX. In a next step, we will use these separated sounds to model the effects of local and regional land use intensity, landscape configuration and vegetation structure on the composition of the soundscape and individual species of the acoustic community, and predict parasitisation rates in birds based on their song characteristics.