AI can catalogue a forest’s inhabitants simply by listening

The rainforests are alive with the sound of animals. Besides the pleasure of the din, it is also useful to ecologists. If you want to measure the biodiversity of a piece of land, listening out for animal calls is much easier than grubbing about in the undergrowth looking for tracks or spoor. But such “bioacoustic analysis” is still time-consuming, and it requires an expert pair of ears.

In a paper published on October 17th in Nature Communications, a group of researchers led by Jörg Müller, an ecologist at the University of Würzburg, describe a better way: have a computer do the job. Smartphone apps already exist that will identify birds, bats or mammals simply by listening to the sounds they make. Their idea was to apply the principle to conservation work.