Ecoacoustics

Biodiversity assessment is a central and urgent task, necessary to monitoring the changes to ecological systems and understanding the factors which drive these changes. Technological advances are providing new approaches to monitoring, which are particularly useful in remote regions. Situated within the framework of the emerging field of ecoacoustics, there is growing interest in the possibility of extracting ecological information from digital recordings of the acoustic environment. Rather than focusing on identification of individual species, an increasing number of automated indices attempt to summarise acoustic activity at the community level, in order to provide a proxy for biodiversity.

In the scope of ecoacoustics, I developed a python toolbox that compute acoustic indices. This toolbox was used to predict avian species richness in temperate and tropical habitats (see the paper).

It was also used to map wilderness areas (see the paper).

I also worked on sinusoidal modelling to detect birds in spectrograms and examine the niche acoustic hypothesis (see the paper).