What is BioAcoustica? Why did we develop it? Where is it going?

1. BioAcoustica: an online repository and
analysis platform for wildlife sound
Ed Baker
http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1591866

2. Where are we, and where are we going?

3. 3
Other Sound Archives: Physical Media

4. 4
Other Sound Archives: Physical Media

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Problems with Physical Media
Bulky
Must be digitised before
doing modern analyses
Harder to search than
digital
Hard to annotate sections
of sound

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Problems with Physical Media

7. 7
Other Sound Archvies: Digital Archives
British Library Sound Archive
Tierstimmenarchiv, Berlin
● Many thousands of recordings. Can search
online then visit/request recordings
● Small number of recordings online

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Other Sound Archvies: Digital Archives
Macaulay Library
● Thousands of recordings, available online
● Online analysis if you use the Raven browser
plugin

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Other Sound Archvies: Digital Archives
xeno-canto
● Community project / citizen science
● 250,000+ plus recordings
● All available online

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Other Digital Resources (Orthoptera)
Archive Orthoptera
recordings
Taxa Taxonomic
focus
Geographic focus
Macaulay 9282 262 Ensifera North America
DORSA-SYSTAX 9176 550 Orthoptera Europe (Ecuador, South East
Asia)
Tierstimmenarchiv 1093 66 Orthoptera
Acrididae
Europe
SINA n.a. (440) Ensifera North America
Orthoptera Species
File
n.a. 776 Orthoptera World-wide
GBIF 3973 XX XX World-wide
Reide, K (Article In Prep)

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Other resources
Data behind many (most?) bioacoustics
publications are not published.
● Hard to re-use data
● Hard to validate studies

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Why BioAcoustica?
Take features from other projects
● Community can upload
● Online analyses
Add new features
● Online annotation of recordings
Utilise existing infrastructure
● Scratchpads

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Scratchpads
EU funded Virtual Research Environment (EDIT;
ViBRANT)
● Handles taxonomy, specimens, references,
media files, taxon descriptions
● Contributes data to GBIF; Encyclopedia of Life
● Integration with Taverna/BioVeL for analysis
using grid computing

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Scratchpads

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Scratchpads

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Developments: Annotations
Annotation
● Describing what a recording contains
● Which part is the spoken introduction?
● Are there regions with excessive background
noise?
● What parts can I use for analysis?
● Deal with multiple species per recording

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Developments: BioVeL
Biodiversity Virtual e-Laboratory
● Runs workflows on a grid computing
infrastructure
BioAcoustica
● Comes with a set of general acoustic analyses
combined into a BioVeL workflow

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Developments: Analyse by default
Every time an annotation is made on a recording
indicating there is a clear call, that section of
audio is analysed

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Developments: Link to Publications

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Making research data available

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Future plans
(Some initial thoughts after a few discussions)

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Future plans
Preserving collections:
Sharing/synchronising recordings and metadata
between projects.
LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe)

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Future plans
Single interface for discovery (taxon neutral)
Global Biodiversity Informatics Facility?

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Future plans
A BioAcoustics workbench
● Shared tool development, shared analyses
● Standard datasets for testing against
● Taverna/BioVeL?

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Thanks
BioAcoustica Team
Ben Price; Vince Smith; Simon Rycroft; Jon Hill
Taverna
Francisco Quevedo
Klaus Riede
Gregor Hagedorn