Hoo’s There? Citizen Scientists Needed to Identify Australian Owl Calls

upstart writes:

Hoo's there? Citizen scientists needed to identify Australian owl calls:

Data from 263,000 hours of continuous recording of sounds of the night from throughout Australia will be available to citizen scientists to listen to and identify the calls of five native owls, and other wildlife, during ABC's Science Week interactive project, Hoot Detective, from August 14 to 22.

The data made available will contain night-time environmental sounds selected by artificial intelligence as having sounds of interest' for citizen scientists. They will then identify sounds in the audio clip from a short list of, for example, owls, frogs, or crickets.

QUT [Queensland University of Technology] Australian Acoustic Observatory director Professor Paul Roe, from QUT School of Computer Science, said it was vital to engage the community in conservation of our native wildlife.

[...] We've become quite disconnected from our natural environment, and we know that connection with the natural environment is beneficial to our health and wellbeing," Professor Roe said.

In terms of citizen science, we have plenty of data from the observatory, far too much for any one person to listen to or to analyse, which is why we need the help of citizen scientists."

We also need help to refine and hone our automatic call recognisers, for this we need test data for training hence the need for annotated data sets and citizen scientists can help with this.

The five feathered creatures of the night whose calls might be identified are the powerful owl, the barking owl, the boobook owl, the barn owl and the masked owl.

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