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Source 03 — Entry
Acoustic monitoring
Passive acoustic monitoring uses recorders left in the field to capture sound over long periods. It detects animals that are heard more easily than seen, such as birds, bats, frogs, insects and, underwater, marine mammals and fish.
Specimen card
At a glance
Autonomous audio recorders, audible or ultrasonic, deployed on a schedule at fixed sites, sometimes underwater with hydrophones.
Audio files with time, site and recorder settings; after analysis, detections of species or call types per time window, often with a confidence score and a reviewed label.
Arbimon for cloud analysis, BirdNET for bird sound identification, Raven for viewing and measuring sounds, Wildlife Acoustics Kaleidoscope. All tools →
Detections map to Darwin Core occurrences; media can be described with Audubon Core. The community around the International Society of Ecoacoustics discusses methods.
Hours of audio per site add up fast. Automated detectors help, but their results depend on species, background noise and region, so validate a sample by ear or spectrogram and record the detector and its version.
Through the life cycle
From field to archive
Pick sample rate, schedule and sites for the species you target; log recorder and microphone details per deployment.
Keep original audio files with their timestamps; storage needs grow quickly, so plan capacity and backups early.
Run detectors or classifiers, then review a sample of detections; keep detector name, version and threshold.
Share detections as occurrences; share raw audio where possible, and remove recordings with human speech.
Archive audio and detection tables together, so later tools can re-analyse old recordings.
Other sources
Camera traps · GPS tracking & telemetry · Remote sensing · Field observations & surveys · Citizen science