Innovation Anthology #693:
Bird researchers traditionally get up at three in the morning and head to the woods for spring time point counts.
They stand, listen and identify the birds they hear calling.
But as Dr. Dan Farr explains, digital technology is gradually replacing the human researcher with remote recorders and computer software.
Dan is Director of the Applications Centre at the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute.
DR. DAN FARR: With a million minutes of recordings, there’s no way we will ever listen to all of those recordings. And so in our program, we’ve trained a computer to reliably find yellow rails, boreal toads, common night hawks, olive sided flycatchers and a handful of other species that make relatively distinctive calls. There’s 200 plus bird species in Alberta, and they each have a distinctive call and each species has different dialiects. So the challenge of developing computer software to identify these species automatically, it’s got huge potential, but we are only in baby steps at this stage.
According to Dr. Dan Farr, the new technology will help ecologists better track the changes to bird populations over time.
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I’M CHERYL CROUCHER
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Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute
Program Date: 2015-06-04