Integrating Biophony into Biodiversity Measurement and Assessment

Wireless acoustic sensor networks and edge computing for rapid acoustic monitoring

“…Although doing so means the loss of permanent audio records, the gains are considerable: remote acoustic monitoring has potential to revolutionise biodiversity monitoring in signalling ecologically important changes, as well as providing a proxy for biodiversity, over spatio-temporal scales which are currently impossible to assess. However many of the regions of critical ecological importance are remote and without electrical grid, presenting a significant technical challenge to the development of large scale acoustic sensor networks [12]: the current approach of transmitting the raw audio recordings obviates long-term deployment in off-grid locations. Taking inspiration from current trends in network computing, we propose a power-efficient and cost-effective solution which computes indices in situ, vastly reducing the data transmission load and therefore bringing power consumption in line with battery or solar powered remote installation.…”