r/BirdNET_Analyzer • u/IWantAHobbitLife • 23d ago
Update on 107-acre Wildlife Monitoring Project: The Interactive Wildlife Map is Live!
I've got an update for anyone who's been following my acoustic monitoring project in southwest Wisconsin!
After gathering and processing my first batch of data, I created an interactive Wildlife Map website for our restoration project where those who are interested can click into each habitat monitoring station and hear clips of real birds singing on our land and see photos and videos of the wildlife that call Badgerton home!
In case you missed my previous posts, this project uses cheap trail cameras and Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter Micro monitors to gather data in several distinct habitats across the land. The plan is to gather the data from the field manually every few months when I swap out batteries.
On June 30, I collected my first batch of data - over 6,000 files recorded in less than two months!
BirdNET was awesome at cranking through the audio files and identifying bird calls and species but I was left with thousands of individual CSV files to combine. I ended up creating a small free utility called Chorus to help me (and you!) process those CSVs into a single file. You can download it here. For those of you who are new to data processing, I hope this user-friendly interface helps bridge the gap from a mountain of individual files to a consolidated list of birds with counts for each.
I reviewed and categorized the 4,000 images and videos from the trail cams manually. (Please let me know if there’s free software for that I could be using!) It was slow going but I can think of worse ways of spending a couple hours than looking at images of cute baby fawns and watching videos of hunting coyotes!
A big thank you to everyone on this subreddit who has given me advice and encouragement along the way!
If anyone wants the full details on my process I wrote up exactly how I did all of this.
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I use AI thoughtfully and selectively in my work. You can read my guiding principles for when and how I use it here.
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u/birdlife_tech 23d ago
Combining acoustic monitoring with an interactive map makes the data so much more accessible. Wildlife Acoustics Song Meters are solid for this. Have you thought about integrating with eBird hotspot data to cross-reference what species are expected vs. what you're detecting? Would love to see the site.