October 19, 2007

Students from around the world attend acoustic seminars held by the Lab's Bioacoustics Research Program. Photo by Susan Spear

Ask BRP director Christopher Clark what he does for a living and he’ll tell you he “listens to the world.” He listens to birds, whales, elephants, amphibians—and people. When other scientists asked for help in listening to the world too, BRP created seminars on the principles of sound analysis and how to use acoustic monitoring tools.

The latest week-long session took place in early October. A group of biologists came to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to learn how to use Raven and XBAT sound analysis software. They hailed from New Zealand, Argentina, Germany, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Their projects include monitoring bats, birds, and marine mammals.

A few of the topics addressed included:

• Properties of sound
• Waveform and spectrographic analysis
• Bird song classification
• Acoustic location techniques
• Real-time sound detection

Denise Risch is using what she learns in a three-year whale monitoring project in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. Photo by Susan Spear

Denise Risch, from Germany, works for the National Marine Fisheries Service out of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute in Massachusetts. Partnered with BRP, she’s involved in a three-year project monitoring whales in the Stellwagen Bank National Marine Sanctuary. The information she collects about the highly endangered North Atlantic right whale will be used to augment existing BRP projects tracking the species in Cape Cod Bay and elsewhere along the East Coast. She’ll use BRP marine autonomous recording devices, called “pop-ups,” beginning in January 2008.

“We are going to use 10 pop-ups in a grid formation to record shipping traffic and whale sounds in the area and try to understand whale behavior in relation to shipping,” she says. Risch is learning about XBAT and Raven software so she can better interpret the sound data collected by the pop-ups. “It’s great to be taught by the people who actually developed the software,” she says.

		Julio Santiago at work in Puerto Rico.  Photo courtesy USFWS

Julio Santiago works on the Puerto Rican Parrot Project for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. There are only 28 to 30 of these birds left in the wild. Another 200 birds live in two aviaries. Partly because each population is isolated, and because captive chicks must be reared by Hispaniola Parrots, there appear to be four distinct Puerto Rican Parrot dialects. That could be an issue when aviary birds are released into the wild.

“I think we’ll have problems in the wild because they will have trouble communicating with each other for bonding, foraging, warning of predators, and so on,” says Santiago. He’s learning to use Raven software to analyze the dialects and visually distinguish them so he can help train aviary birds to understand their wild cousins.

Ph.D. student Ignacio Areata of Argentina is learning to use Raven sound analysis software for his thesis project, taking advantage of reduced costs for users in developing countries. To expand opportunities for those unable to travel to the Lab, other training methods being developed may include web seminars and instructional DVDs.

“We do what we do because we believe in conserving the natural world,” Clark says. “One of our responsibilities as scientists is to use the technology we develop to further conservation. It’s also our job to communicate our wonder and passion about what we learn to the general public.”

For information on BRP group seminars and other training opportunities, contact Kevin White at (607) 254-2438 or wkw2@cornell.edu.

--Pat Leonard