BioAcoustica: an online repository and analysis platform for wildlife sound

Ed Baker

http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1591866

Where are we, and where are we going?

3

Other Sound Archives: Physical Media

4

Other Sound Archives: Physical Media

5

Problems with Physical Media

Bulky

Must be digitised before doing modern analyses

Harder to search than digital

Hard to annotate sections of sound

6

Problems with Physical Media

7

Other Sound Archvies: Digital Archives

British Library Sound Archive

Tierstimmenarchiv, Berlin

● Many thousands of recordings. Can search

online then visit/request recordings

● Small number of recordings online

8

Other Sound Archvies: Digital Archives

Macaulay Library

● Thousands of recordings, available online

● Online analysis if you use the Raven browser

plugin

9

Other Sound Archvies: Digital Archives

xeno-canto

● Community project / citizen science● 250,000+ plus recordings● All available online

10

Other Digital Resources (Orthoptera)

Archive Orthoptera recordings

Taxa Taxonomic focus

Geographic focus

Macaulay 9282 262 Ensifera North America

DORSA-SYSTAX 9176 550 Orthoptera Europe (Ecuador, South East Asia)

Tierstimmenarchiv 1093 66 OrthopteraAcrididae

Europe

SINA n.a. (440) Ensifera North America

Orthoptera Species File

n.a. 776 Orthoptera World-wide

GBIF 3973 XX XX World-wide

Reide, K (Article In Prep)

11

Other resources

Data behind many (most?) bioacoustics publications are not published.● Hard to re-use data● Hard to validate studies

12

Why BioAcoustica?

Take features from other projects● Community can upload● Online analyses

Add new features● Online annotation of recordings

Utilise existing infrastructure● Scratchpads

13

Scratchpads

EU funded Virtual Research Environment (EDIT; ViBRANT)● Handles taxonomy, specimens, references, media files, taxon descriptions

● Contributes data to GBIF; Encyclopedia of Life● Integration with Taverna/BioVeL for analysis using grid computing

14

Scratchpads

15

Scratchpads

16

Developments: Annotations

Annotation● Describing what a recording contains● Which part is the spoken introduction?● Are there regions with excessive background noise?

● What parts can I use for analysis?● Deal with multiple species per recording

17

Developments: BioVeL

Biodiversity Virtual e-Laboratory● Runs workflows on a grid computing infrastructure

BioAcoustica● Comes with a set of general acoustic analyses combined into a BioVeL workflow

18

Developments: Analyse by default

Every time an annotation is made on a recording indicating there is a clear call, that section of audio is analysed

19

Developments: Link to Publications

20

Making research data available

21

Future plans

(Some initial thoughts after a few discussions)

22

Future plans

Preserving collections:

Sharing/synchronising recordings and metadata between projects.

LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)

23

Future plans

Single interface for discovery (taxon neutral)

Global Biodiversity Informatics Facility?

24

Future plans

A BioAcoustics workbench● Shared tool development, shared analyses● Standard datasets for testing against● Taverna/BioVeL?

25

Thanks

BioAcoustica Team

Ben Price; Vince Smith; Simon Rycroft; Jon Hill

Taverna

Francisco Quevedo

Klaus Riede

Gregor Hagedorn