From the Autumn 2022 issue of Living Bird magazine. Subscribe now.
Pioneering physicist and Nobel laureate Niels Bohr is often credited with the Danish aphorism, Prediction is very difficult, expressly if its well-nigh the future!
This issue of Living Bird includes the yearly report of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and I love reading it, not just to gloat what our teams and collaborators have achieved over the past year, but to visualize whats coming next. This year Im struck by the impact next-generation bioacoustics is having wideness our programs and products. So, while its unchangingly prudent to alimony Bohrs circumspection in mind, I do believe we are inward a bioacoustics revolution.
The most obvious manifestation for many of us is the wing of Sound ID to our Merlin Bird ID app for smartphones, which combines the magic of strained intelligence and the depth of our Macaulay Library sound gazetteer to put a world-class birding companion in each of our pockets. Plane as I sit here on the deck writing this essay, I have my phone on the table next to me, quietly running Merlin Sound ID, alerting me to the little tinks and fries that identify the warblers that have dropped into Ithaca overnight, and plane the soft bink of a Bobolink upper overhead as it begins its monumental journey south.
The impact of this acoustical revolution is much deeper than simply permitting us to recognize bird species calling in our gardens and parks. It has turned us into bionic birdwatchers; super-detectors of plane the most difficult species. This will have a profound effect on the type of data we gather as resider scientists, meaning we have to retune our eBird population models to take into worth the fact that increasingly people are worldly-wise to find and identify increasingly species. As the repertoire of sounds expands, we are plane whence to be worldly-wise to identify the migratory bird species that are flying over us at night, using flight calls to understand exactly which species are using which routes, on which days. The science of bird monitoring will never be the same again.
The revolution is moreover broader than birds and birdwatchers per se. Many of the techniques underpinning this new era of bioacoustics were originally ripened for other taxonomic groups, particularly cetaceans (whales and dolphins). One of the most heady discoveries I have heard over the past year is that fish moreover make species-specific calls, and these are once stuff used to manage reefs and fisheries. This multi-taxon tideway to bioacoustics is baked into the DNA of the Cornell Lab from its primeval days and, through the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics, we are now monitoring groups as diverse as insects, mammals, and amphibians. The key whop has been to combine flexible software for strealined species recognition, such as BirdCast, with huge arrays of voluntary sensory recording units, like Swift and Rockhopper, and to make the software and devices openly misogynist to researchers and communities virtually the world. The race is now on to find ways to power these recorders for longer periods, to run the ramified species recognition software on the device itself, and to transmit data on the species detected by lamina or satellite networks. Live monitoring of biodiversity wideness the planets unconfined oceans and wilderness areas is within our grasp.
Like all paradigm shifts, the bioacoustics revolution is met with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. I predict it will not only transform how we identify species but moreover unshut up nature for a wider range of people, and put cutting-edge scientific monitoring in the hands of resider scientists and conservationists virtually the world. Having said all that, I recognize concerns that some may consider the new technologies to be unchaste in some way, and streamlined bird sound ID could midpoint people no longer learn how to recognize calls themselves. I stipulate we need to modernize how to use these technologies to promote learning, and we will certainly need to recalibrate how we collect and interpret resider science data, and make sure we protract to protect privacy. But to me, the opportunities vastly outweigh the risks.
As merchantry guru and tragedian Peter Drucker said, The weightier way to predict your future is to create it. Long live the revolution!
