Abstract
Passive acoustic monitoring of soundscapes and biodiversity produces vast amounts of audio recordings. However, the management of these raw data presents technical challenges and their analysis suffers from bottlenecks. A multitude of software solutions exist, but none can perform all the data processing needed by ecologists for analysing large acoustic data sets. The field of ecoacoustics needs a software tool that is free, evolving, and accessible. We take a step in that direction and present BioSounds: an open-source, online platform for ecoacoustics designed by ecologists and built by software engineers. Biosounds can be used for archiving and sharing recordings, manually creating and reviewing annotations ofsonant animals in soundscapes, analysing audio in time and frequency, and storing reference recordings for different taxa. We present its features and structure, and compare it with similar software. We describe its operation mode and the workflow for typical use cases such as the analysis of bird and bat communities sampled in soundscape recordings. BioSounds is available from: https://github.com/nperezg/biosounds.
Highlights
Automated, passive recording for biodiversity research has come of age
To realise the potential of ecoacoustics projects, different software tools are required in different data processing and analysis stages: First, soundscape recordings - comprising all sounds recorded in a landscape2 - need to be archived and made accessible to collaborators, either locally or remotely[3]
Automated detection and classification of sounds is used to facilitate processing large amounts of audio data[6]. The latter still need to be verified by human experts, who rely either on their own knowledge, or reference recordings found in audio repositories linking recordings to species identities[7]
Summary
Bayne , University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. Any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. Keywords Soundscape, sound analysis, ecoacoustics, passive acoustic monitoring, automated sound recording, autonomous recording units, spectrogram, audio annotation
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