Natural Exchanges:
AI Bioacoustics with WildMon's Chrissy Durkin
At Catona Climate, we’re constantly leveraging cutting-edge technology — including the latest in artificial intelligence — to track the impact of our projects. Watch as our partner Chrissy Durkin from WildMon explains how there’s “so much data locked away in sound” — and how major advances in AI and large-scale data processing allow us to interpret massive amounts of acoustic information. Now we can better understand how our projects affect biodiversity by listening to what the birds, frogs, and insects have to tell us.
Transcript:
By collecting acoustic data, you're able to use that data to go a lot deeper into the ecological impacts that are occurring in all of these places that we're working to restore around the world.
I'm Chrissy Durkin. I'm Co-founder and Chief Development Officer at WildMon.
WildMon is a team of mostly scientists and technology developers who are creating the practices to comprehend all of the biodiversity, all of the fauna that is inhabiting ecosystems.
The way we do that is really with three different data types: sound, sight, and DNA presence.
There's so much data locked away in sound. Scientists have been recording in the field, collecting that data and then interpreting it primarily by listening to it. However, it's a huge amount of information when you're putting hundreds of sensors across the landscape, collecting that data, and then need to essentially understand what is happening within that massive dataset.
Just in the last decade have we really had the technology to store big data, develop AI models, develop algorithms to start processing this data at scale.
The way this happens in the field is you deploy many offline sensors. A team on the ground goes and deploys them across an ecosystem, leaves them for several weeks, and then collects those devices. All of that data is then uploaded into a cloud-based platform that makes it possible to then process those raw recordings to get at species presence and soundscape analyses.
The next step is to integrate all of those outputs and then be able to combine that with satellite imagery to really understand what is happening within the ecosystem and the environment.
With Trees for the Future and Catona Climate, WildMon has been deploying acoustic sensors across Forest Garden approach project sites. Additionally, degraded landscapes, and primary and secondary forests.
We're so excited — this year we'll be really digging into the results. How do these different approaches compare? And how are they affecting how birds are returning, how insects and frogs are returning to these environments where they couldn't previously exist?
Catona Climate has been such an incredible partner because it's rare to have people on the financing, bridging-that-gap side of projects so invested into the positive impact on the ground.
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