Open Ecoacoustics Takes Flight in Perth

Open Ecoacoustics built significant momentum in Perth, driven by recogniser training, hands‑on community workshops, two conferences, a series of webinars and the soft launch of its verification microsites.

The Open Ecoacoustics community came together in Perth at the end of last year for a week of intensive training and meetings, reflecting the growing momentum.

Open Ecoacoustics is building open, practical tools and training so researchers, conservation practitioners and citizen scientists can manage, share and analyse environmental sound data at scale. That means better monitoring of wildlife, stronger conservation decisions, and data products that can be reused as methods improve.

From “Interesting Idea” to Hands-On Results #

At the Acoustics 2025 conference in Perth, around 44 people attended the “How to build a recogniser” workshop, led by Dr Philip Eichinski (Open Ecoacoustics) and Dr Tom Denton (Google DeepMind).

Several attendees worked with their own passive acoustic monitoring data (audio collected by autonomous recorders). They used Open Ecoacoustics coding notebooks to rapidly search hundreds of hours of recordings for their species of interest. One participant summed up the value: the recogniser tools helped them hear wild cat calls in audio where nothing obvious showed up on the spectrogram (a visual view of sound).

The message from the room was clear: the tools are now at the point where people can move from curiosity to confident workflows.

The Open Ecoacoustics Workshop #

The following Monday, 55 people joined a broader Open Ecoacoustics Workshop. The day connected the “why” (monitoring examples) with the “how” (platform workflows and emerging standards).

Speakers and themes included:

• Prof Paul Roe (JCU), Dr Anthony Truskinger and Dr Philip Eichinski presented on the Open Ecoacoustics program, tools and coming features.
• Dr Tom Denton (Google DeepMind) shared his latest efforts to estimate species abundance from acoustic recordings.
• Dr Liz Znidersic (Charles Sturt University) showcased applied use cases in wetland monitoring and what is needed to make methods field-ready.
• Mark Cowan (Curtin University) demonstrated the Indigenous environmental monitoring platform they have developed.
• Callan Alexander (QUT) and BirdLife Australia highlighted how clustering can improve recogniser performance.
• Dr Siobhan de Little (Ecotec) spoke of the Ecoacoustics work happening in Tasmania and how the Open Ecoacoustics team has helped.
• May-Le Ng (Ecoacoustics Guidelines Australia) covered her ongoing work on developing deployment standards with the broader ecoacoustics community.
• Dr Rob Clemens (ARDC) covered some of the downstream spatial analyses that are enabled by ecoacoustic data.

The afternoon breakout sessions were well attended, primarily including informal discussions on building recognisers, clustering, using Ecosounds, deployment standards and spatial analyses. Additionally, there was a standout session on Indigenous environmental monitoring and the future use of ecoacoustics by Indigenous communities.

Ecoacoustics Takes Flight at the Australasian Ornithological Conference #

Later that same week, the ARDC and Open Ecoacoustics sponsored a booth at the Australasian Ornithological Conference (AOC) 2025, where a facilitated ecoacoustics symposium expanded from one session to 4 sessions due to high demand.

Presentations ranged from new methods through to eye-opening species stories, including:

• Dr Tom Denton (Google DeepMind) presenting on “Counting the chorus: Call density from classifiers”
• Callan Alexander (QUT) on annotation-driven approaches to improve detection pipelines
• Dr Stewart Ford (Biota) provided a striking update on seasonality and roost site fidelity of a Night Parrot including some previously unknown vocalisations
• Dr Rob Clemens (ARDC) presented on improvements to modelled distributions and survey design facilitated by passive acoustic monitoring data.

Webinar Series: Learn It, Then Re-Watch It #

Not everyone can travel. In 2025, the Open Ecoacoustics webinar series made the work accessible nationally, with 281 people attending live, and 774 more watching on YouTube. More webinars are coming in 2026!

You can watch the webinar recordings via the ARDC YouTube playlist, including:

• Webinar #1: Ecoacoustics in Action: Real-World Applications and Insights
• Webinar #2: BirdNET tips, tricks and insights
• Webinar #3: Open Ecoacoustics in Action: Fundamentals & Analysis
• Webinar #4: Open Ecoacoustics and Powerful Owl projects

Verification Microsites and Recognisers Are Coming #

Two verification sites are now live for citizen scientists to help verify AI-generated identifications of bird calls. Jump on now and uncover bittern and powerful owl sounds.

More sites like this will be coming for communities that want help scaling the verification of AI-generated classifications. Further, it continues to get easier to create your own call recogniser, and automated methods should be available on Ecosounds in the coming year.

Get Involved #

If you have a community of citizen scientists that are keen to verify AI-generated results, reach out to Open Ecoacoustics, and the team may be able to set up a verification site for you.

Join the Open Ecoacoustics email list and get notifications about the next webinar, upload an audio dataset to Ecosounds and contact the team to try the workflow end to end.

Learn more about Open Ecoacoustics at the ARDC.

The ARDC is enabled by the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS) to support national digital research infrastructure for Australian researchers.

This article is a cross-post, reproduced with permission from the ARDC website.