It started as a simple spreadsheet that documented locations where researchers were recording sound to monitor biodiversity. Three years on, the Worldwide Soundscapes project is a global database on when, how and where passive acoustic monitoring is being deployed around the world. “This is a project that is now becoming too big to be handled by only one person,” Kevin Darras, currently senior researcher at France’s National Research Institute for Agriculture, Food and Environment (INRAE), who conceived the project, told Mongabay in a video interview. Darras started the project when he was a postdoctoral researcher at Westlake University in China. The idea struck when he was waiting for updates on another project he was working on at the time. With the project, Darras said he was attempting to fill a void that often led to duplication of efforts in the research community that uses passive acoustic monitoring — audio recorders left out in the wild — to study biodiversity around the world. “There was a scientific gap in the sense that we didn’t know where and when we were sampling sound for monitoring biodiversity,” he said. Passive acoustic monitoring has long been used to listen in on insects, birds and other animals in ecosystems around the world. It’s aided scientists to detect elusive species in a noninvasive manner. For example, a team in Australia used acoustic recorders and artificial intelligence to track down the breeding hollows of pink cockatoos (Lophochroa leadbeateri leadbeateri) in a remote region. The method has also…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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