Bioacoustic Data

Our four ground-level wildlife cameras are great at capturing data about terrestrial animals like mammals as well as birds that frequent the forest floor. Bioacoustic recordings allow us to expand our study into the forest canopy and beyond, picking up sounds made by birds that stick to the tops of trees or are infrequent visitors to the woods. Our bioacoustic recording device is left for 24 hours to pick up avian sounds. Once it's brought back into range of wifi, the recordings are uploaded to Cornell's BirdNET avian analysis network, which analyzes the recordings and assigns each one to a bird call. These are each given a rating by BirdNET, and only those with relatively high confidence ratings (>60%) are included in the data here. 

In addition to helping expand the study's coverage area up into the canopy, bioacoustic data also allows us to fine-tune our visual observations. For example: American crows and fish crows are virtually indistinguishable from each other visually, especially on the cameras we use. But through the use of BirdNET bioacoustic analysis, we've been able to determine that more than half of all crows we're seeing on the cameras are likely fish crows — which was a surprise to us as fish crows usually only live near open water!