[ad_1]
A new search tool from Google Australia lets ecologists and conservationists upload recordings of wildlife calls, and instantly match them to thousands of similar sounds from around the country, allowing for ecosystem insights that could otherwise take thousands of hours to achieve.
The AI-powered tool is an extension of the tech giant’s partnership with the Queensland University of Technology and the Australian Acoustics Observatory, or A20, a nationwide network of recorders, which earlier this year revealed an initiative that can process huge amounts of audio data and isolate the calls of specific wildlife.
Researchers can upload their recordings, and match them to bird calls from around the country.
By using the new tool, dubbed A20 Search, researchers can tap into the millions of hours of indexed recordings from the observatory, to pinpoint where else a particular call has occurred without needing to scrub through audio manually. QUT’s Professor Paul Roe, lead researcher at A20, said it was a huge leap for conservation.
“What we have built here is a search tool to liberate the data collected in the field. Instead of trying to manually sift through what amounts to hundreds of years of data that we could not live long enough to go through, AI does it for us,” he said.
“You have to understand the environment before you can protect it, and bringing ecology and computer science together like this is the key.”
He said research enabled by this system would help land managers make informed decisions about conservation, management, and biodiversity protection.
Once a researcher has uploaded a recording, they highlight a five-second clip containing the call they want to search, and the tool returns results in a matter of seconds. They can then be refined by location, date, or time of day, plotted on a map or used to make further searches.
Researchers can also download the audio, or export a spreadsheet with details of all their matches, which could be useful in making their own machine learning classification tools. A20 Search is designed primarily for bird calls, but also works for koalas and other noise-making animals.
[ad_2]