news

Led by Félix Michaud (congratulations!), this new paper, published in Ecological Informatics, offers a workflow to automatically label sound of interests in birdsong recordings as those found in xeno-canto dataset. The resulting labelling function based on segmentation, featurization, and clustering is available in an open-source Python package named bambird.

EAR is happy to present a new paper in Methods in Ecology and Evolution ! In this publication, you’ll find all you need to know about outdoor sound propagation and detection distance of autonomous recording units in the context of passive acoustic monitoring. Enjoy !

Welcome back to Manon, a formal master student of EAR, who is starting a PhD on detectability in ecoacoustics with the challenging objective to provide efficient tools for conservation practitioners. Her PhD is co-supervised with Frederic Sèbe (ENES, Université Jean Monnet) and is funded by the french company Biophonia, thanks to a CIFRE grant.

Start of a new project in the Haut-Jura (France) with the Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Jura and the Université Jean Monnet: monitoring of orthoptera communities to assess acoustic diversity of open areas (gentian meadows) within closed areas (spruce forest).

This publication, led by Elie Grinfeder, PhD student at the Ecole normale Supérieure and at EAR, reviews the concept of soundscape and, through a functional and source-filter approach, suggests the use of three soundscape categories: the distal soundscape (the spatial and temporal distribution of sounds in a pre-specified area, in relation
to sound propagation effects), the proximal soundscape (collection of propagated sound signals that occurs at a specific position in space) and the perceptual soundscape (individual subjective interpretation of a proximal soundscape). Congratulations to Elie!

We have just started a new project in the French Pyrenees in the Nature Reserve Py. We will monitor orthoptera communities over years to estimate the success of a restoration program in mountain open fields. Check out the project here.

Jérémy who is a post-doc at the ENES lab (Université Jean Monnet, Saint-Etienne) is visiting us for a few weeks. Jérémy works on the automatic monitoring of ptarmigans (Lagopus) with Dr. Frédéric Sèbe.

Second paper related to our project dB@Risoux. Using a convolution neural network, we automatically tracked over a complete year the buzzing sound of flying insects and the drumming sound of woodpeckers and. This revealed function phenology and seasonality in relation with weather. Pollination might be affected by rainfall increase and wood use by temperature rise. The work, which was led by Alexandre Folliot, was published in Science of the Total Environment.

Soyeon is visiting us for a 6-month period. She comes from the Animal Communication lab led by Prof. Yikweon Jang (Ewha Womans University, Seoul, South Korea). During her visit, Soyeon will analyse her acoustic data dealing with urban park connectivity and amphibian population tracking.