University of Georgia researchers, developed the new tool uses artificial intelligence to analyse terabytes of recordings for quail calls, giving wildlife managers the ability to gather the data they need in a matter of minutes. Plus, wildlife experts can potentially put hundreds of the devices in the field to cover more area with a lot less effort than the thousands of man-hours traditional methods require.

Figure 1: artificial intelligence to analyse quail calls.

Figure 1 shows that Bag limits for quail season are determined based on current populations of the bird, which are regularly evaluated and revised. But the process for gauging the bird populations is gruelling, time-consuming and expensive. [1]

“The model is very accurate, picking up between 80% and 100% of all calls even in the noisiest recordings. So, you could take a recording, put it through our model and it will tell you how many quail calls that the recorder heard,” said James Martin.

“This new model allows you to analyse terabytes of data in seconds, and what that will allow us to do is scale up monitoring, so you can literally put hundreds of these devices out and cover a lot more area and do so with a lot less effort than in the past.”

"The software represents about five years of work by Martin, Victoria Nolan and numerous key contributors who have worked with a code writer to create the model. It’s also part of a larger shift taking place in the field of wildlife research, where computer algorithms are now assisting with work that once took humans thousands of hours to complete. [2]

Increasingly, computers are getting smarter at, for example, identifying specific noises or certain traits in photos and sound recordings. For researchers such as Martin, it means hours once spent on tasks such as listening to audio or looking at game camera images can now be done by a computer, freeing up valuable time to focus on other aspects of a project.

As the software gets more use and is exposed to sounds from new geographic areas, Martin said, it gets even “smarter.” As it is, quail offer several different kinds of calls. But when the software is exposed to a variety of sounds that aren’t quail, he said, it’s better able to distinguish the correct calls from the ambient noises of the grasses and trees around them. [3]

References:

1. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-tool-could-difference-between-211700499.html/
2. https://news.uga.edu/ai-answers-the-call-for-quail-information/
3. https://sciencenewsnet.in/artificial-intelligence-answers-the-call-for-quail-information/

Cite this article:

Sri Vasagi K, New Tool (AI) to Analyse Terabytes of Recordings for Quail Calls, Anatechmaz, pp.186