What are the challenges and opportunities for data sharing in bioacoustics? Lorentz Workshop, Leiden.

1. DATA SHARING IN
BIOACOUSTICS
ED BAKER

2. SOME BIG QUESTIONS
• What is this sound?
• Where and when does this sound occur?
• What sounds like this?
• How is sound effected by X?
Sound as a proxy for taxa, rainfall, traffic, Dave, UFOs,…

3. A BIGGER QUESTION
•Why?
From describing to understanding

4. CHALLENGES IN BIOACOUSTICS
Some classic ones:
• Cost
• Efforts
• Storage
Will touch on storage

5. A BIGGER CHALLENGE
•Search
A whole suite of related challenges

6. TYPES OF SEARCH
• Discovery of datasets
• Discovery of metadata
• Discovery within files

7. OTHER EXAMPLES (BIODIVERSITY)
• GBIF
• GloBI
• Traitbank
Small pieces… loosely joined
Data managed and published in
many places
Aggregated centrally using TDWG
standards

8. WHY AREN’T WE THERE?
• Searching inside sounds is a bit hard
• But as a community we’re bad at some basic
aspects of open science

9. FAIR PRINCIPLES
• Findable
• Accessible
• Interoperable
• Reusable
Baker E, Vincent S (2019) A deafening silence: a lack of data and reproducibility in
published bioacoustics research? Biodiversity Data Journal 7:
e36783. https://doi.org/10.3897/BDJ.7.e36783

10. WHAT DOES A SYSTEM NEED?
• Publication of data and metadata
• Standards for aggregation
• An aggregator

11. WHAT DOES A SYSTEM NEED?
• Publication of data and metadata – we need to do better
• Standards for aggregation – AudubonCore for metadata
• An aggregator – working on it…

12. WHAT SHOULD WE AGGREGATE?
• Metadata of recordings
• Annotated regions (ann-o-mate – coming soon)
• Other analyses for search

13. SEARCHING INSIDE ‘ALL THE AUDIO’
• There’s so much data if we aggregate it all!
• Analysis IS compression (think of extreme form of MP3 that
only keeps what you are looking for)
• Outputs of analysis are small (labels, vectors, numbers) and
easy to query

14. WHAT’S USEFUL?
• Indices – maybe?
• Labels – yes, particularly with some taxonomic categorization, but also think rain,
traffic noise, etc
• Feature vectors – just ask Sarab
• What about a combination? Potentially very interesting

15. CAN ANSWER MORE COMPLEX QUESTIONS
• Does this species sing just after it rains?
• How does aircraft noise effect the vocalization of this family of birds?
• What habitat in North America sounds most like this bog just outside York?
• Many others… just from sound analysis
• But can integrate further…. E.g. correlate with organism traits (TraitBank)

16. WHAT’S NEXT?
• I am moving back to NHM to spend some time (in part)
prototyping an aggregator (audioBlast).
• A basic version should be functional soon
• Comments/ideas/contributions/complaints –
edward.baker@nhm.ac.uk