Audio archive is named after Jacques Vielliard (see photo), the ornithologist responsible for most of the recordings, who died in 2010.(Antoninho Perri/Unicamp)

Project recovers archive of animal sounds at Unicamp
2013-02-20

Audio archive is named after Jacques Vielliard (see photo), the ornithologist responsible for most of the recordings, who died in 2010.

Project recovers archive of animal sounds at Unicamp

Audio archive is named after Jacques Vielliard (see photo), the ornithologist responsible for most of the recordings, who died in 2010.

2013-02-20

Audio archive is named after Jacques Vielliard (see photo), the ornithologist responsible for most of the recordings, who died in 2010.(Antoninho Perri/Unicamp)

 

By Elton Alisson

Agência FAPESP – One of the world’s largest collections of animal sounds—including bird songs, frog croaks and insect chirps—makes up the Fonoteca Neotropical Jacques Vielliard collection, curated by the Universidade Estadual de Campinas Biology Institute (IB/Unicamp).

However, many of the recordings in the collection, which began in the 1960s, do not include information essential for interested biologists to study the animals’ behaviors. Such information includes temperature and rainfall at the time the sound was captured.

A study held at the Unicamp Computer Science Institute (IC/Unicamp) with FAPESP funding is working to increase the information available about the sounds in the archive by including climatic and environmental data about the day, time and location of each recording.

“We realized that because many of the recordings in the archive were made a long time ago, much important information about them was missing,” said the author of the study, Daniel Cintra Cugler, to Agência FAPESP.

A good number of the recordings were made in the 1960s by French ornithologist Jacques Vielliard, professor at Unicamp, who passed away in 2010.

Cugler says the lack of technology at the time made it difficult to document the climatic factors influencing animal behavior the moment the sounds were captured. Animal calls can vary, for example, according to temperature, time of year and the presence or absence of rain.

The study results will help biologists to make a more precise analysis of animal behavior based on the sounds and to establish conservation strategies for endangered species.

“The biologists who made the field recordings collected the animal sounds but probably didn’t have a thermometer with them to measure the air temperature. Because of this, they only mention the location where the recording was made without documenting, for example, the temperature or altitude of the location” explained Cugler.

Help from other sources

So Cugler began developing a system for recovering these data. Based on the coordinates of the location and the day and time at which the animal call was recorded, information about the temperature and speed of the wind at that exact moment can be obtained from NASA, the North American Space Agency.

NASA’s space satellites have been recording images of Earth for decades. Recently made available online in a system that operates 24 hours a day, the images have filters with information on the UV levels, soil humidity and plant cover of a certain place on the day and time the image was taken.

When cross-referencing information on the date, time and location of an animal vocalization recording from the archive using the NASA data, an enormous list of climatic variables from the time can be obtained.

“We can also obtain additional data from INPE [The National Institute for Space Research] and Embrapa [the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation] to further improve the content of the climatic variables,” said Cugler.

The researchers on the project separate the relevant information from the list of climatic variables available from these institutions and update the data in the archive.

“We have to be very careful about what is added in order to preserve the description of the original data,” affirmed Cugler.

Cugler is currently in the United States, carrying out part of the study at the University of Minnesota together with a group of researchers specialized in data from space.

In addition to associating the coordinates of the animal call recordings with rainfall and temperature—the climatic variables that most influence animal behavior—the researchers intend to include information about factors such as earthquakes that may have happened at the time, which stimulate vocalization in certain animals, such as elephants.

“The intention of the study is to carry out satellite data analysis of the animal vocalization recordings that make up the archive,” said Cugler. “If we manage to correlate the recording location with the environmental variables, biologists will be able to do better, faster research,” he affirmed.

e-Science

Cugler’s work is part of a series of initiatives for improvements to the Fonoteca carried out in recent years under the coordination of professor Claudia Bauzer Medeiros at IC Unicamp, who is the advisor for Cugler’s project, and Luís Felipe de Toledo Ramos Pereira, collaborating researcher at the IB Zoology Museum and one of the audio archive’s curators.

Pereira is currently carrying out a project as part of FAPESP’s Young Researchers in Emerging Centers program as well as a study undertaken in conjunction with scientists at the University of Michigan, funded by an agreement between FAPESP and the National Science Foundation (NSF).

The result of a cooperative agreement between researchers at Unicamp’s IC and IB, the Fonoteca improvement projects aim to recover and improve the management, sharing and enrichment of the collection’s data through the use of computational tools. The work is part of a project funded by FAPESP through an agreement with Microsoft Research.

“This type of work exemplifies what is called e-Science: cooperative research between computer scientists and researchers from other fields of knowledge so they can develop their work better, faster or in a different way,” said Cugler.

Most of the information in the archive—which is composed of some 40,000 vocalizations from all groups of vertebrates and some groups of invertebrates such as insects and arachnids—was stored on electronic spreadsheets.

Through the project, the researchers have begun in recent years to transfer the information to a database to make the recovery and management easier and to digitize the recordings, which were mostly made on magnetic tape.

Online

At the end of 2011, a website was created with over 11,000 calls that had already been digitized from the archive (proj.lis.ic.unicamp.br/fnjv) so they would be available to the scientific community in this field and those interested in this “musical genre”. The site has had hits from users in over 60 countries. “The recordings of vocalizations available on the site still don’t have the climatic information we’re recovering. We will be updating the database with new information soon,” said Cugler.

Today, the website allows access to vocalizations for authorized researchers and public access to general information related to them, such as name of the species and the location, date and time of recording, or the recording conditions.

The researchers and the general public can also request the digitized sounds from the archive’s curators through an electronic form.

Aside from sound recordings of more common animals, such as the sparrow and rufous-bellied thrush, the archive has calls that have rarely been recorded in nature, such as that of the cougar.

“The archive has preserved calls recorded in places where the ecological conditions today are no longer what they were before. In this way, it conserves a precious part of our biodiversity’s past,” stated Cugler.

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