Monitoring bird diversity from space using citizen scientists

Matt Clark
Environmental Studies and GIS, SSU

Stevenson Hall 1300
11:00 AM - 11:50 AM

Soundscapes to Landscapes (S2L) is a NASA-funded project led by Dr. Matthew Clark of the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Analysis (CIGA), in Geography, Environment and Planning. The broad goal of the project is to advance animal diversity monitoring from the next generation of Earth-observing satellites. The project uses sounds recorded from low-cost recorders placed in the field (i.e., soundscapes) and bioacoustics analysis to identify bird species by their calls and measure overall avian diversity. Bird diversity data are used by the science team to explore the benefits and trade-offs in using new and existing sensors in space for mapping of bird diversity and conservation planning. One new sensor the team is using is NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), docked on the International Space Station, which uses a laser to provide detailed measurements of vegetation canopy height and internal structure that can be related to bird habitat. A critical component of S2L is a partnership with “citizen scientists”, or volunteers in the community, that help with placement of recorders on public and private lands, assist with data management, and identify bird calls in sound recordings. The project facilitates citizen science work with a web-based bioacoustics analysis platform (Arbimon) that permits rapid bird-call validation. These validation data are then used to train and test convolutional neural network classifiers for automated bird-call detections in recordings.