BirdNET-Pi - Intro
BirdNET Pi
Using machine learning/AI and a Raspberry Pi to monitor avian diversity.
Ornithologists have been using bird calls to identify the presence of species and to estimate populations of birds for a very long time. There are few drawbacks to that method however. Bird surveys, conducted to estimate bird abundance, tend to start really early in the morning. On top of that, trained ornithologists are rare “birds” - there’s seldom one around when you need them.
Anthropocene noise
Anthropogenic Noise on the Range
Painted Bunting interrupted by aircraft noise.
Anthropogenic Noise interrupts Painted Bunting
The above image is a spectrogram of a Painted Bunting (the evenly spaced vertical squiggles) that was interrupted by engine noise from an aircraft overhead. The ripples are the aircraft - the frequencies get higher as the aircraft approaches. When the frequencies get up into the range of the bunting call he stops calling, until they subside as the aircraft gets further away.
Paintbrush Ponderings
Alan Nelson’s key to Oklahoma Castilleja from Keys and Descriptions For The Vascular Flora of Oklahoma.
What started out as a quick photo for a simple post turned into an afternoon of studying multiple taxonomic keys, distribution maps and pollination ecology.
Since I work in the border counties along the Red River in Oklahoma, my primary reference for plant identification is the Flora of North Central Texas (FNCT).
Landscape Linguistics II
Oak savanna with encroaching brush
A previous post provides some context to the following discussion but isn’t required.
Landscapes provide lots of information regarding their current and historical status. We just have to learn to listen - or see.
A large Post Oak surrounded by much smaller Shumard oaks, cedars and ashes.
The big oak on the right of the above image has no lower limbs, nor does it have recent burn scars.
Landscape Linguistics I
Eastern Redcedar seedling in understory
The Language of the Land
The quality of the story depends on the skill of the listener.
Rumor has it that the Inuit have a hundred or so words in their language for “snow”. I’m sure that most of those would be lost on me because I simply don’t have the sophistication to distinguish them. Having grown up in Southern Oklahoma where there’s no guarantee we’ll even see snow from one year to next - I never developed that much of an appreciation for it outside of the fact that sometimes it makes better snowballs(and hurts worse when you get hit).
Publications
Current Projects
Webb, S.L., J.A. Martin, M.D. Proctor, and S.M. Harju. In preparation. Long-term occupancy of male northern bobwhite quail: effects of temporally and spatially dynamic landscapes.
Wolfe, B., C. Nicholson, M.D. Proctor, and S.L. Webb. In preparation. Methods for developing and analyzing bioacoustic templates from field recordings: applications to avian ecology.
Magazine Articles
Webb, Stephen, Proctor, Mike. 2020. 7 Things Research Tells Us About Northern Bobwhite and What They Need.
Range Ecology Network
Looking at Range Ecology as a Network
The following is a convoluted attempt to capture and visualize many of the relationships involved in rangelands. While certainly not exhaustive, the objective was to at least demonstrate representative relationships taking place on the landscape.
Relationships are depicted by a combination of “nodes” , which are any factors capable of influencing any other factor, and “edges” (the lines between nodes) which indicate the direction(s) of that relationship.
Disturbingly Undisturbed
Too much of the same is rarely a good thing.
For the most part we have a very narrow concept of what native rangeland vegetation should look like. That view tends to be very static. We don’t realize that what we see on a single visit is not necessarily what it will look like on the next visit. What we lack awareness of is how the plant communities vary over time depending on what is taking place on the landscape.