From: University of Georgia
October 18, 2022 -- When
states want to gauge quail populations, the process can be grueling,
time-consuming and expensive. It means spending hours in the field listening
for calls. Or leaving a recording device in the field to catch what sounds are
made -- only to spend hours later listening to that audio. Then, repeating this
process until there's enough information to start making population estimates.
But a new model aims to streamline this process. By using artificial
intelligence to analyze terabytes of recordings for quail calls, the process
gives wildlife managers the ability to gather the data they need in a matter of
minutes.
"The model is very
accurate, picking up between 80% and 100% of all calls even in the noisiest
recordings. So, you could take a recording, put it through our model and it
will tell you how many quail calls that the recorder heard," said James
Martin, an associate professor at the UGA Warnell School of Forestry and
Natural Resources who has been working on the project, in collaboration with
the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, for about five years. "This
new model allows you to analyze terabytes of data in seconds, and what that
will allow us to do is scale up monitoring, so you can literally put hundreds
of these devices out and cover a lot more area and do so with a lot less effort
than in the past."
The software represents
about five years of work by Martin, postdoctoral researcher Victoria Nolan and
numerous key contributors who have worked with a code writer to create the
model. It's also part of a larger shift taking place in the field of wildlife
research, where computer algorithms are now assisting with work that once took
humans thousands of hours to complete.
Increasingly, computers
are getting smarter at, for example, identifying specific noises or certain
traits in photos and sound recordings. For researchers such as Martin, it means
hours once spent on tasks such as listening to audio or looking at game camera
images can now be done by a computer, freeing up valuable time to focus on
other aspects of a project.
The new tool can also
be a valuable resource for state and federal agencies looking for information
on their quail populations, but with limited funds to spend on any one project.
"So, I think this is something states might jump on as far as replacing
their current monitoring with acoustic recording devices," added Martin.
The software's success
was recently documented by the Journal of Remote Sensing in Ecology and
Conservation.
As the software gets
more use and is exposed to sounds from new geographic areas, Martin said, it
gets even "smarter." As it is, quail offer several different kinds of
calls. But when the software is exposed to a variety of sounds that aren't
quail, he said, it's better able to distinguish the correct calls from the
ambient noises of the grasses and trees around them.
Over time, the software
will grow more discerning.
"So that's why you
have to keep giving it training data, and when you move geographies, you
encounter new sounds that you didn't train the model for," he added.
"It's always about adaption."
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/10/221018131139.htm
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