A Successful Crowdsourcing Approach for Bird Sound Classification

Automated recorders are increasingly used in remote sensing of wildlife, yet automated methods of processing the audio remains challenging. Identifying animal sounds with machine learning provides a solution, but optimizing the models requires annotated training data. Producing such data can require much manual effort, which could be alleviated by engaging masses to contribute to research and share the workload. Birdwatchers are experts on identifying bird vocalizations and form an ideal focal audience for a citizen science project aiming for the required multitudes of annotated avian audio data. For this purpose, we launched a web portal that was targeted and advertised to Finnish birdwatc…