IEEE eScience: Acoustic Environment Observatory Toward an Acoustic Environment Observatory
Authors from QUT
(Paul Roe from Microsoft QUT eResearch Centre speaking)

Ecosystem processes –
standard sensor monitor cycling of water and nutrients, energy transfers – but you need something different to look at biodiversity and species interactions with the environment – they’re using acoustics

scale up from traditional processes of monitoring with eyes and ears in the field (and taperecorders)

what to study with acoustics?
- detect
- behavior

- examples climate change (detect migratory species), invasive species, indicator species
- (they’re doing terrestrial, much has already been done with underwater

trying to do this at scale
- cheap sensors, automatic processing
- system is always evolving (data errors, broken sensors)

difference between – sensing the temperature 1x/hour and send, vs. continuous collection (kind of like reverse podcasting). Very different from like home security surveillance testing

data > middleware to manage sensors > signal labeling manual/semi-auto/auto (SciBot)> semantics, tag meaning and inference (behaviors and annotations)

they use solar power and cell phones with special software

web interface for scientists to schedule recordings, phones use 3G to upload the data
power is limiting – use too much for go too long without the sun – also uploading takes longer in bad weather

signal processing
- manual
- template based like speech recognition
- information theoretic approach to find signal

analysis and visualization
- point data this bird, this call, this time and place -- weave together to understand more about environmental health

useful in some environmental impact studies, tracking this rare and hard to see bird
also, why do koalas bellow

can listen: www.mquter.qut.edu.au/sensor

Labels: IEEEeScience08

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