The sounds of biodiversity, captured in real time

Victorias Department of Environment and Primary Industries (DEPI) has been working with an
electronic product developer and a soundscape ecologist to create a system that can calculate a
farms biodiversity by remotely recording and analysing the collective sound insects and animals
make in the natural environment - biophony.
The challenge
The impetus for this innovation lay in DEPIs need to document the environmental sustainability of
Victorian farms, according to David Williams, a Principal Research Scientist in the department.
Victoria is the biggest food and fibre exporter in Australia, and this move would help bolster the
strength of its agricultural sector, valued at $8 billion a year.
The need to measure biodiversity led Williams to the work of Professor Stuart Gage from Michigan
State University in the United States, who has developed acoustic indices and algorithms that
measure the amount of energy in each frequency range and from that calculate an areas
biodiversity.
Inspired by biophonic measurement of biodiversity in US water catchments, Williams decided to
apply an acoustic index.
I was interested in using the index to demonstrate how good the agricultural production system
was in terms of biodiversity, so we got some money from DEPI to do a pilot study, Williams says.
However the study led to an enormous amount of acoustic data collected from a recorder left in
the field, and no fast way to upload it and begin analysis.
Armed with the study results and his technology requirements, Williams successfully bid for $1.5
million from the Market Validation Program. His requirements were for a cheap and robust
automated sensor system that would monitor biodiversity via sound. The sensors, which would
record the data, needed to be deployed in a production orchard and networked with data collection
that would be managed remotely.
The solution
The successful design came from Procept, a Melbourne-based company that specialises in
embedded systems and had a track record of delivering technology innovation in health, mining,
defence and science.
The biophony project allowed us to really apply some of our intellectual property around wireless
technology, hardware design, says Procept Managing Director Aaron Maher.
The system includes up to ten sensor stations, which record and store high-definition audio. A
dual-band mesh network, operating at 2.4 GHz and 900 MHz, allowed the data to be transferred
over large areas by hopping through the network to a gateway, which automatically uploaded the
captured audio to a remote content server, accessible via a website.
The complexity is really the transfer of high-definition audio around a wireless network that can
span kilometres, as well as able to transfer back to a server and process all of that in a format that
scientists can use, says Maher.

Where to next?
This is only the beginning, according to the collaboration partners.
With the way we have recorded this data, you can get a sonic fingerprint of whats out there. So
you can, in theory, teach the computer to identify signals down to a species level, says Williams.
With this capability, he says, the department will look at the possibility of identifying predatory
animals, exotic incursions and endangered species, though for the moment it is concentrating on
further biophony research in different vegetation habitats.
Gage is also excited about the research possibilities that the automated biophony system will open
up, Scientists often take ages to get meaningful information to the decision-makers, and we need
to do it in a much more timely and user-friendly way. This system makes it feasible to assess
ecosystem health in real time.
For Maher, It has opened up potentially a multi-million dollar business, he says. We have found
that this system applies to so many industries - mining, defence.

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