Development and Validation of Automated Detection Tools for Vocalizations of Rare and Endangered Anurans

Abstract

AbstractFor many rare or endangered anurans, monitoring is achieved via auditory cues alone. Human-performed audio surveys are inherently biased, and may fail to detect animals when they are present. Automated audio recognition tools offer an alternative mode of observer-free monitoring. Few commercially available platforms for developing these tools exist, and little research has investigated whether these tools are effective at detecting rare vocalization events. We generated a recognizer for detecting the vocalization of the endangered Houston toad Anaxyrus houstonensis using SongScope© bioacoustics software. We developed our recognizer using a large sample of training data that included only the highest quality of recorded audio (i.e., low noise, no interfering vocalizations) divided into small, manageable batches. To track recognizer performance, we generated an independent set of test data through randomly sampling a large population of audio known to possess Houston toad vocalizations. We analyzed training data and test data recursively, using a criterion of zero tolerance for false-negative detections. For each step, we incorporated a new batch of training data into the recognizer. Once we included all training data, we manually verified recognizer performance against one full month (March 2014) of audio taken from a known breeding locality. The recognizer successfully identified 100% of all training data and 97.2% of all test data. However, there is a trade-off between reducing false-negative and increasing false-positive detections, which limited the usefulness of some features of SongScope. Methods of automated detection represent a means by which we may test the efficacy of the manual monitoring techniques currently in use. The ability to search any collection of audio recordings for Houston toad vocalizations has the potential to challenge the paradigms presently placed on monitoring for this species of conservation concern.