Abstract:
Biodiversity monitoring is important in assessing
the state of an ecosystem and determining if conservation actions
are required. This is particularly important when conservation
resources are scarce. However, traditional methods of biodiver-
sity monitoring are labour intensive and cannot be applied in
every ecosystem where there is need. In order to expand the
application of biodiversity monitoring, there is need to automate
this important task. In this work we present an application of
audio diarization methods for biodiversity monitoring and show
how these methods can be used to measure the abundance of
indicator taxa in areas of interest. The use of audio recordings has
the potential to reduce the time and effort spent in biodiversity
monitoring. The experiments are performed on a freely available
dataset of bird song recordings with the birds serving as indicator
taxa in the ecosystem of interest. We are able to estimate the
number of bird species in the recordings and this information
can be used to estimate the species richness in an ecosystem.