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, landholders 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.
In Phase 1 (2021 to 2023, doi.org/10.47486/PL050), 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 aim of the project is to make large-scale ecoacoustic monitoring simple, cost effective and routine. This requires tools, services, platforms, training, standards and expertise.
This project will contribute to the Planet RDC objectives directly by providing a national-scale ecoacoustic data infrastructure for environmental researchers, policy makers and decision makers, and research data managers. The platform will integrate with other Machine Observation Data services including camera trap data to provide a comprehensive picture of biodiversity and threatened species suitable for downstream tools and services including the generation of environmental reports and scorecards as required by land managers.
It will contribute to MADSI program objectives by providing threatened species and biodiversity data which can drive models, analytics and decision support tools. We will work closely with the EcoCommons to build a pipeline from raw data collection and analysis (Open Ecoacoustics) to modelling and decision support (EcoCommons). In addition to facilitating existing workflow through metadata, common standards and interoperability, we will investigate how new workflows, derived from researchers and stakeholder, can be supported, for example occupancy models and socio-ecological and prioritisation models.
This project will contribute to state and federal government priorities, including:
New system features for Open Ecoacoustics that will be developed in Phase 2 include:
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.
In Phase 2 (2024 – 2026), short term outcomes will be:
Medium term outcomes:
Long term outcomes:
Research organisations, researchers, ecological agencies and government policy makers will benefit from the project’s core features:
We thank all the partners involved in Phase 1:
