FuSe: Technologies For Bioacoustic Sensing

Biodiversity is facing an unprecedented decline whilst the pressure on the earth's ecosystems continues to grow. Recognising the status of biodiversity and its benefit to human wellbeing, the world's governments committed in 2010 to take effective and urgent action to halt biodiversity loss through the Convention on Biological Diversity's targets. These targets require monitoring to assess progress towards specific goals. Such large-scale biodiversity assessment calls for methods which are able to provide an understanding of large-scale patterns in species' distributions, abundances and changes over time. This relies on surveys to collect data that are representative at a regional to national scale, and robust analysis that is able to provide an informed understanding of species' populations.

As a group, bats (Chiroptera) are particularly challenging to monitor because most are nocturnal, wide-ranging and difficult to identify. Historically the monitoring of bats in temperate regions has focused on intensive site-based visual counts or capture surveys. There is considerable value in these approaches, but it is difficult to confidently infer from these what is happening at a wider population level. Acoustic surveys have been used in the UK to monitor bats for the past few decades (e.g. Bat Conservation Trust's National Bat Monitoring Programme), but it is only very recently that advances in sensor technology and analytical acoustic tools have made it possible to identify and monitor more than a handful of easy to identify species.

Many of the first open-source tools for automatically detecting and identifying bat species from sound recordings were developed from our previous NERC funded research. We developed acoustic reference libraries for European bat species and the first automatic machine learning classifier. We have since built on this work through our recent EPSRC and Zooniverse funded projects, to make use of the latest machine-learning technologies (Convoluted Neural Networks, CNNs) and through this developed an open-source pipeline for the detection of search-phase echolocation calls and species identification.

Despite recent and exciting developments in acoustic species identification, there remain substantial challenges for their cost-effective use within a scalable monitoring tool. A major barrier for deployment at scale is the expense of acoustic sensors, which typically cost up to £1000. As part of this consortium, research at Oxford University has focused on the development of low-cost sensors (http://soundtrap.io), which record uncompressed audio to an SD card. The current sensors are not designed to record at high frequency for bats, but prototype versions, which would cost less than £50 have already been modified and deployed in trials to record bats.

The FuSe (Technologies For Bioacoustic Sensing) research consortium brings together this expertise in bat acoustic analysis (University College London), computer science and open source sensor hardware (Oxford University), with large-scale citizen science (British Trust for Ornithology), and national-level bat population monitoring (Bat Conservation Trust). Integrating cutting edge analytical tools for the species identification of bats with the development of new low cost sensors, and expertise in the interpretation of data collected through large-scale volunteer-based acoustic surveys and bat monitoring, we will create an end-to-end open-source system for the large-scale acoustic monitoring of bat populations. This is a catalytic proposal, which has huge implications for the future of bat and bioacoustic monitoring.

Through careful working with stakeholder groups and our project partner the Bat Conservation Trust (see Case for Support, Outcomes, Beneficiaries and Impacts) we will co-produce the requirements for data outputs and interactions of the FuSe system. The project will produce substantial benefits for the Bat Conservation Trust, stakeholders and wider public by:

-- Enabling rigorous and sustainable monitoring of bats at national and international scales --

There is a clear need for recent advances in sensor technology and analytical acoustic tools to be implemented into national and international bat monitoring programmes. In the short and medium term by working in partnership with the Bat Conservation Trust the innovations described in this proposal will benefit bat monitoring in the UK by enabling: (1) the monitoring of a greater range of bat species than is currently possible, increasing the number of species for which it is possible to produce robust metrics of status, change and distribution; (2) the collection and processing of much larger amounts of data for a similar level of volunteer effort. This will improve our ability to collect data over longer survey periods and to monitor the rarer bat species. As a longer-term benefit, innovation made possible through this project is likely to adopted by other countries, leading to a step improvement in global bat monitoring and understanding of bats.

-- Providing robust data for wider use and decision making by stakeholders --

Implementing such innovation into national bat monitoring would provide data that will be of immense value to a wide range of stakeholders, including government, statutory nature conservation bodies, local planning authorities, developers, land managers and conservation bodies. In the short and medium term, outputs from the project will be used for a wide range of purposes including for (1) strategic planning; (2) the assessment of favourable conservation status; (3) the condition of protected sites; (4) agri-environment schemes; (4) indicators of environmental quality. In the longer-term, such data will improve our ability to quantify the impact of potential drivers of population change.

-- Inspiring interest, awareness and enthusiasm for bats -

This project will bring science, nature and technology together to harness volunteers' enthusiasm for discovering more about the nocturnal biodiversity in their gardens and local area. By engaging with a much wider audience of volunteers, who will not require previous bat monitoring experience, we will increase interest, understanding and awareness of bats and bat conservation. The longer-term benefit is a public who take greater responsibility for the natural environment and wildlife within it.