Cyberinfrastructure for the analysis of ecological acoustic sensor data: a use case study in grid deployment

Abstract

-The LTER Grid Pilot Study was conducted by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the University of New Mexico, and Michigan State University, to design and build a prototype grid for the ecological community. The featured grid application, the Biophony Grid Portal, manages acoustic data from field sensors and allows researchers to conduct real-time digital signal processing analysis on high-performance systems via a web-based portal. Important characteristics addressed during the study include the management, access, and analysis of a large set of field collected acoustic observations from microphone sensors, single signon, and data provenance. During the development phase of this project, new features were added to standard grid middleware software and have already been successfully leveraged by other, unrelated grid projects. This paper provides an overview of the Biophony Grid Portal application and requirements, discusses considerations regarding grid architecture and design, details the technical implementation, and summarizes key experiences and lessons learned that are generally applicable to all developers and administrators in a grid environment.

Practical Analysis of Big Acoustic Sensor Data for Environmental Monitoring

“…Acoustic sensors are regularly used to monitor vocalizing fauna with the intent of assessing biodiversity [1,2]. Acoustic sensor data can also address ecological questions relating to the vocalizing patterns of fauna, the presence or absence of species, and species abundance.…”

Pandemics and the Need for Automated Systems for Biodiversity Monitoring

“…Examples include the standardized motion-sensitive camera arrays across continental tropical forests of Africa, Asia, and Latin America provided by the Tropical Ecology Assessment and Monitoring Network (Ahumada et al 2011) and Wildlife Insights (https://www.wildlifeinsights. org, accessed 21 May 2020); the continental-scale network of acoustic sensors of the Australian Acoustic Observatory (https://acousticobservatory.org/, accessed 21 May 2020); the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Grid Pilot Study using acoustic sensors (Butler et al 2007); and the multi-sensor network from the Okinawa Environmental Observation Network (Ross et al 2018).…”