2023-05-27 10:07:49
Comparatively simple task: a singing blackbird.
Image: dpa
Smartphone apps can help when you’re standing in nature and hearing birds singing. What the apps can do and what their limits are.
When you stand in the forest and it chirps, you rarely know what kind of bird it is. There are bird fans who have managed to recognize songs from videos and CDs. And experienced scouts sometimes succeed in recognizing the originators of the song in the undergrowth and identifying them based on their appearance. For a few years now, however, there has been another, much simpler way of identifying birds acoustically: using an app.
The media computer scientist Stefan Kahl from the Technical University of Chemnitz developed in 2018 together with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, one of the top addresses for ornithology worldwide, the app BirdNET. It records ambient noise using the smartphone microphone and converts it into a spectrogram, i.e. a visual representation of the noise. The user selects an excerpt of the unknown bird song, this is sent to the server and the app uses the location and date to calculate the probability of the occurrence of individual species.
#apps #recognize #native #bird #calls