South Africa's wild animals have long been prized by international trophy hunters. Now scientists are hunting for the noises made by the country's animals as part of an international biodiversity project involving US space agency NASA.
BioSoundSCape is a bioacoustics addition to a broader project called BioSCape — an international collaboration between the South African National Space Agency and NASA. The animal sound recordings are being added to a huge database about the Cape floristic kingdom, obtained via high altitude jet and satellite imagery. The data allows scientists to form a clearer picture of the Cape’s famed biodiversity, which continues to inspire research projects across multiple fields.
Details of the sound recording project were presented this week at an international bioacoustics conference in Cape Town. Delegates learnt how rangers last year deployed recorders for several days at multiple sites to gather animal data related to NASA’s imaging survey. The survey used hi-tech aerial photography and satellite imagery to obtain information about the terrain, which can now be matched with the data about animal life.
The data presented this week detailed how scientists are developing an audio recording model to distinguish specific species' vocalisations from the background “noise” of human sounds (anthropophony), other animal sounds (biophony) and environmental sounds like wind and rain (geophony).
The ability to accurately distinguish between sounds allows scientists to gather more accurate data about the prevalence of particular species.
“We were interested to know how the wind, rain and human noise would affect our ability to detect species,” study co-author and presenter Matthew Clark told TimesLIVE Premium.
Results to date suggest AI can filter out background wind and rain. “I thought it was going to be a major factor, but those sounds don’t really affect AI’s ability to predict the species we want,” said Clark.
Conversely AI was less adept at filtering out human noises, he added.
The BioSoundSCape project was one of many presented at the conference spanning bioacoustic work in several scientific fields.
Other notable studies included analysis of elephant “rumblings” — to detect levels of aggression — dolphin signature whistles, and how to measure habitat health by the sound of snapping shrimp.
