Using the Power of Sound to Tackle Australia’s Biodiversity Crisis

Learn how Open Ecoacoustics is helping researchers listen to the land to preserve Australia’s native animals and ecosystems.

Australia’s bushland has a voice. Every chirp, croak and howl tells a story about our native wildlife; a rich source of information about the health of our ecosystems. But as biodiversity continues to decline, nature’s voice is changing. Now, scientists are turning to the power of sound to listen to the land and help preserve our wildlife.

Monitoring Biodiversity Through Sound #

Many animals use sound to communicate, navigate, and interact with their environment. These acoustic signals provide valuable data about population size, an animal’s location, and what they’re doing. As a result, acoustic monitoring has become a powerful tool for understanding ecosystem health.

Networks of sound recorders have been deployed across Australia to capture environmental sounds and help researchers detect pests, monitor changes in wildlife populations, and assess ecosystem dynamics.

However, managing and analysing this large volume of data is a significant challenge. The methods used to process and describe data are not standardised, and the data are often siloed across different research institutions and repositories. This makes it difficult to find, integrate and use the acoustic data to make informed decisions.

Open Ecoacoustics: Making Acoustic Monitoring Effective and Routine #

Open Ecoacoustics is a platform that helps to understand environmental changes through big data, allowing for informed environmental management decisions.

Supported by co-investment from the ARDC’s Planet Research Data Commons and part of the ARDC’s Machine Observation Data Processing Infrastructure, Open Ecoacoustics provides open access to data, technologies, methods and standards to help monitor and manage threatened species and ecosystems on a continental scale. This ensures acoustic monitoring data can be processed easily and is interoperable and reusable to maximise its impact. The platform delivers data that helps to inform management actions for over 30 partners across government, industry, and the private sector.

The pipeline starts with acoustic sensors that record the sounds of the environment and its inhabitants. The resulting big data are uploaded to the platform, where automatic data processing prepares the data for the next steps. This includes standardising the data to a common format, generating sonograms for all the recordings, and calculating embeddings for the entire dataset. Algorithms called ‘recognisers’ scan the recordings from the acoustic sensors and identify sounds from the species of interest. The data are processed and analysed using AI (partially run on GPUs within the ARDC’s Nectar Research Cloud to transform the data into species occurrence records. These species observations can then be made available in a FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) format so they can be reused, fed into ecological modelling tools, or integrated into biodiversity databases such as TERN and the Atlas of Living Australia. The Open Ecoacoustics platform consists of 2 main databases: Ecosounds and the Australian Acoustic Observatory.

Professor Paul Roe, project leader at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), said Open Ecoacoustics makes acoustic monitoring effective and routine so that anyone can use it.

“The idea is that you upload your data, adjust the settings to reflect what you’re interested in – such as a particular species – and then the data will get automatically uploaded and analysed,” said Prof Roe. “It’s very much about keeping the data accessible.”

“While the Open Ecoacoustics project is about a platform, it’s equally about the people in the partnerships. They’re the ones on the ground doing the good work,” said Prof Roe.

Insights from the Wetlands #

Dr Liz Znidersic, a post-doctoral researcher from the Gulbali Institute at Charles Sturt University, uses Open Ecoacoustics in her project Eavesdropping on Wetland Birds. Dr Znidersic and her team do what she calls “detective work” to find species that are seldom seen. They do this by recording thousands of hours of wetland sounds to understand the distribution and presence of some of Australia’s most secretive bird species by their calls (including rails, crakes and bitterns) in south-eastern Australia and Tasmania.

Her research helps with the conservation management of the endangered Australasian Bittern. With a population estimate of only 1,300 in Australia, their critical habitat in the Murray Darling Basin is changing, largely due to the impacts of climate change and significant water usage for agriculture and other priority areas. The low-frequency mating calls of the male bitterns can be used to indicate when water levels in the wetland ecosystem are ‘just right’ to provide all the necessary resources critical to the reproduction of this species.

“If we can start to understand the relationship between water levels and calling, that’s going to improve their chance of survival,” said Dr Znidersic.

Her team uses Open Ecoacoustics to store, manage and process the acoustic data. Other researchers can also download her data from Ecosounds and reuse it to answer new research questions.

“Open Ecoacoustics will give us the ability to go backwards in time,” said Dr Znidersic, “We’ve got recordings from almost 10 years ago – an extraordinary acoustic library, which will enable researchers to critically review ecosystems and single species movements and changes.”

Listening to the Health of our National Parks #

Further north, the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service use Open Ecoacoustics in their Ecological Health Performance Scorecards program to track the changing health of NSW national parks, providing important information about native plants, animals, and natural resources.

“You can’t manage what you don’t measure,” says Danielle Stokeld, Manager of the Ecological Health Unit of the NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. “The scorecards help us better understand the biodiversity and ecological condition of the parks so that land managers can integrate the information into their management decisions.”

Open Ecoacoustics plays an important role in the analysis and storage of the collected acoustic data. The program has already discovered that some species, including the Eastern pygmy possum, are more abundant than previously thought.

“The data itself are useful for increasing knowledge on species across the state, which contributes to threatened species management and assessments. From the public’s perspective, it’s also about increasing confidence that we’re managing our parks effectively and being transparent about what actions we are taking to make them even better,” said Ms Stokeld.

What’s Next for Open Ecoacoustics? #

With Phase 2 of the project underway, the ARDC is supporting Open Ecoacoustics to streamline existing data processing and develop a validation interface that can be used by expert users and citizen scientists to validate the output of automated soundscape analyses. The project will also work towards facilitating data exchange with the Atlas of Living Australia and Ecocommons Australia to enable greater integration of biodiversity data. Additionally, Open Ecoacoustics aims to improve database search capabilities and mapping visualisations, as well as enable seamless access for Australian researchers through the Australian Access Federation (AAF).

Hamish Holewa, Director of the ARDC’s Planet Research Data Commons, said, “The ARDC is proud to partner with innovative projects like Open Ecoacoustics to make biodiversity monitoring more accessible and scalable. The ARDC Nectar Research Cloud is a critical enabler in providing the computing power needed to process and analyse vast amounts of acoustic data. Together, we are equipping researchers, policymakers and conservationists with the resources they need to respond to environmental challenges across Australia.”

Learn more about Open Ecoacoustics.

Open Ecoacoustics received co-investment (doi.org/10.3565/ts8c-ee10) from the ARDC. The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS).

Written by Dr Cintya Dharmayanti, Scientell. Reviewed by Prof Paul Roe (QUT), Danielle Stokeld (NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service), Dr Liz Znidersic (Charles Sturt University), Hamish Holewa (ARDC).

This case study was originally posted on the ARDC website.