As part of the UEA Soundscapes Monitoring Project, researchers have been running approximately 60 recording devices across the UK for the past three years. The recordings collected have been processed through BirdNET, an automated bird sound identification tool. As part of this process, they need to assess how well BirdNET performs under different conditions, including different seasons (breeding and non-breeding) and times of day.
To do this, they are appealing for volunteers to manually validate a subset of BirdNET’s identifications. This involves listening to a random sample of audio clips and identifying which species are present. These will then be compared to the BirdNET output for that clip. An online platform has been developed to make this process as straightforward as possible and you can access it at https://audiochecker.uea.
Every validated recording helps improve shared understanding of automated bird sound identification and strengthens the scientific value of the dataset. There is no expectation that you validate a large number of clips in one sitting; indeed, we would suggest that regularly returning to the programme for short bouts rather than listening to lots of clips in one go might be more effective.
Thank you for your help with this exciting project.