Sitta neumayer (Photo: Piet Munsterman, Saxifraga Foundation; www.ecnc.org)

Sound library of the Western Rock Nuthatch

Tabs

Information

Quick facts

Project title:

A sound library of the Western Rock Nuthatch Sitta neumayer

ZFMK Project lead:

Dr. Till Töpfer

Unit:

Ornithology, Evolutionary Genomics, Centre for Taxonomy and Morphology (ztm), Centre for Molecular Biodiversity Research (zmb)

Object of research:

Birds

Description

In the present project we build high quality sound libraries to facilitate the subsequent development of an automated sound recognizer for the Western Rock Nuthatch Sitta neumayer. Despite the fact that this species is very active vocally, only few sound recordings are available via open resources. The audio recordings used in this study originate from the Automatic Acoustic Monitoring and Inventorying of Biodiversity (AMIBIO) project. A medium-term aim of this project is to analyse the diurnal and seasonal activity patterns of the Western Rock Nuthatch.

The development of automated sound recognizers comprises two main steps: building sound archives and programming software tools. The first step consists of the compilation of training, background, and validation libraries. In the second step, these expert annotated sound libraries are used for the development and calibration of the mathematical algorithms that eventually detect animal sound signals in long field recordings (soundscapes).