Aggregating and Integrating Data on Health Outcomes Associated with Bushfires at a National Scale
Exploreabout Aggregating and Integrating Data on Health Outcomes Associated with Bushfires at a National Scale
Open Ecoacoustics
A platform for continental-scale ecological monitoring and research
Who will benefit
Research organisations, researchers, ecological agencies, government policy makers
Program
The Challenge
Australia’s biodiversity crisis necessitates urgent action to deliver continental-scale monitoring and management of threatened species and ecosystems. Acoustic monitoring is set to revolutionise this by capturing a permanent, direct, scalable and objective record of the environment.
As inexpensive open source recorders are now deployed en masse, researchers, governments, land holders and the community can use acoustics to monitor their land, understand changes to native wildlife populations and detect pests.
However, managing and analysing big acoustic data is difficult due to a lack of standardisation in methods and metadata. Siloed local data collections prevent aggregated continental-scale analysis.
Biodiversity and land managers are calling for a way to share acoustic data and tools, and to visualise and analyse data.
The Response
The Open Ecoacoustics project extended and generalised an existing QUT platform, the Acoustic Workbench, to open it to everyone. This platform enables the aggregation, sharing and citation of FAIR annotated datasets, species recognition algorithms (‘recognisers’), and analytical tools.
It has achieved interoperability with other systems including TERN, Atlas of Living Australia, EcoCommons and citizen science through microservices and shared tools.
The project developed a standard for ecoacoustics data and metadata to ensure data is interoperable and reusable. Training for users and the establishment of a community around ecoacoustics has helped to ensure the adoption and sustainability of these standards.
The platform supports the ingest, search and downloading of data from different devices and services using standard and common industry formats and services. A flexible backend permits data storage on different cloud services including the ARDC Nectar Research Cloud and commercial cloud storage.
Easy-to-use ecoacoustic data analysis tools allow pre-processing of data on ingestion, annotation, standardised HPC interfaces for mass data analysis, and visualisations of acoustic data.
Third-party analysis tools such as R, Python scripts, and Java can be installed using containers. Users can share analyses and metadata, including test data sets and descriptions of tunable parameters. Citizen scientists can annotate and validate analyses.
The Outcomes
Access Open Ecoacoustics.
Open Ecoacoustics supports continental-scale fauna monitoring and research, something that was previously impossible, and is contributing towards a national ecosystem observatory capability.
This will revolutionise ecological research, including the management and conservation of biodiversity, threatened species and food security.
Who Will Benefit
Research organisations, researchers, ecological agencies and government policy makers will benefit from the project’s core features:
The Partners
- QUT
- Atlas of Living Australia
- TERN
- EcoCommons Australia
- BirdLife Australia
- James Cook University
- The University of Queensland
- Bush Heritage Australia
- NSW Department of Primary Industries
- Charles Sturt University
- University of New England
- Museums Victoria
- University Of Melbourne
- Queensland Parks and Wildlife Service and Partnerships
- Australian Wildlife Conservancy
Contact the ARDC
Timeframe
February 2021 to March 2023
Current Phase
Complete
ARDC Co-investment
$312,048
Project lead
Professor Paul Roe, QUT
Categories
Research Topic
Related Projects
