Intelligent Biodiversity Monitoring & Reporting

Wilder Sensing uses Artificial Intelligence (or Machine Learning to be more precise) to analyse the patterns in an audio file. It scans a file in 3 second chunks and tries to identify what, if anything, has made a sound. Each possible identification is given a confidence rating – e.g. the AI estimated that it was 87% certain it was a European Robin. It takes a few seconds to scan an hour-long file. 

The results are added to the database for your project and recorder. You can then see the results in our analytics platform – by time/date, species, index etc.

We don’t typically provide the recorders as we work with most models on the market.

– We can help you decide what may be best for your situation.

Choosing the ‘right’ recorder will depend on a number of considerations such as budget, how long you want to record for, how often you can visit the recorder and how you want to sample the recordings – 24/7 or dawn/dusk or 15 mins per hour. We work with almost any recorder which can record at 44kHz or above – basically CD quality.

There are a number of options available in the market such as the range from Wildlife Acoustics and AudioMoths both of which will typically be constrained by battery life. There are recorders which will send audio files via a 4G connection and have solar panels and large external batteries and, while they can be expensive, can be suitable for very sensitive or hard to reach sites.

Manufacturers bring out new models on a regular basis often with improved battery life.

Contact us and we can take you through the various considerations and options.

This will depend on your project – is it a short or long term project and how often can you visit the recorder to change the batteries and memory cards.

In an ideal world you would record 24/7 at 48kHz but that’s not always possible. Less expensive recorders might only last a 3 – 4 days before the batteries go flat. More expensive recorders with lithium batteries could last a month or more. If you can attached a solar panel then they could be left for a long period of time but you will have lots and lots of big audio files to upload.

This can vary considerably depending on the project. Some sites have only one while others have 20+. The key considerations depend on the purpose of the project so you may, for example, have a couple of recorders in part of a site which is not undergoing any planned change and can act as a control site. You may want to sample different habitats across a landscape.

Contact us – we are happy to share our approach.

Your recorder will have a memory card where the files are stored. Insert the card into the appropriate slot on your laptop and sign on to Wilder Sensing with your issued userid and password. You then select the files you want to upload using our File Manager and set it off uploading your files. You will need a good broadband upload speed as the files are typically quite large and there could be hundreds of them.

Once we have received the files they get processed and the results published in the analytics platform.

Once a batch of files have been uploaded, each file is processed with an hour-long file taking a few seconds. Each sound is identified and put through a filter to remove the very odd identifications – species that have never been recorded in the area. An hour long file, depending on the time of year, habitat and location, can generate hundreds of records – dawn chorus can be incredibly noisy!

Customers are given an userid and password to access the results from their files – on the analytics platform. This is where you will see the species mix over time, time of day etc. Some sites have over a million records so a range of graphs, tables etc can help you understand the data and understand what’s happening on your site or landscape.

Each identification made is assigned a probability which is similar to how humans identify a sound. There have been lots of validation checks from projects we have run around the world and almost all of them are correct. Sometimes however it gets it wrong for one of two reasons – a false positive where the wrong species is identified and a false negative where it misses something that should have been identified.

Wilder Sensing is being used by a broad range of organisations ranging from Wildlife Trusts, other Non-Governmental Organisations, government agencies, global charities, Ecological and Environmental Consultancies and major land owners amongst others

Wilder Sensing will work in most parts of the world as our reference library covers almost 4,000 bird species.

Customers subscribe to Wilder Sensing based on how many recorders they have deployed and how long they want to record for. Short term surveys – typically 2 – 3 weeks are very cost effective while annual or long term surveys can save very significant amounts of money from data storage, survey efficiency and better results.

We offer a significant discount for NGOs and other not-for-profit organisations.

Contact us via our web site and ideally provide details of a project you have in mind.

On a call we can take you through how we help you plan a project, what recorders you might need and overall costs. We can demo the platform as well. It’s really straightforward..