The paper discusses how active learning (AL) can alleviate the expert annotation bottleneck in biodiversity monitoring by selecting the most informative samples under a fixed budget. It highlights that while AL reduces labeling effort, its non-random sample selection complicates model validation, calibration, and ecological inference, issues often overlooked in current studies. The authors review existing AL research across acoustic and image data, identify gaps such as limited species coverage and lack of real-world deployments, and propose a tutorial framework and roadmap for developing AL methods that support efficient training, reliable validation, and trustworthy ecological conclusions.
arXiv:2609.15255v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Ecological monitoring increasingly relies on machine learning models, whose performance depends on the quality and quantity of labelled data. However,...
The paper introduces ACORN, a method that blends machine‑learning predictions with occupancy models to guide ecologists in selecting which samples to review. By strategically choosing the most informative labels, ACORN achieves ecological conclusions nearly identical to fully human‑labeled data while dramatically reducing the number of expert reviews needed. The approach is evaluated on camera‑trap and bioacoustic datasets, demonstrating its effectiveness across real‑world biodiversity surveys.
arXiv:2607. 14072v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data.
ChiroEcho is a deep learning framework that jointly predicts bat species and genus, then uses genus predictions together with geographic species distributions to identify species not present in the training taxonomy. By incorporating geographic constraints, the system expands its effective taxonomy, enabling classification of 41 out of 48 native European bat species—an increase from 73% to 85% coverage. The study demonstrates that limited evaluation data can mask species‑level performance and that combining coarse predictions with external constraints can recover labels for unseen fine‑grained classes.
arXiv:2606. 03821v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active learning is now standard practice in labeling ecological data, enabling ecologists to quickly process large volumes of field data to understand and monitor natural environments.
arXiv:2609.11986v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring produces far more bat recordings than experts can label. We show that simple model-generated pseudo-labels turn this surp...
arXiv:2606. 10940v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles.
Camera traps have become a cornerstone of biodiversity monitoring, but the artificial intelligence that turns vast quantities of images into usable ecological data is often locked behind commercial platforms or trained on fauna that does not match that of the British Isles. In an attempt to remove barriers and increase uptake, we release an open-source object detection model for 31 classes, 28 common UK mammal and bird species, plus utility classes for humans, calibration poles, and vehicles, drawn from a curated dataset of 48,165 labelled instances assembled from multiple sites over a decade of operational deployment through Conservation AI and its successor, Trap Tracker.
Active learning is now standard practice in labeling ecological data, enabling ecologists to quickly process large volumes of field data to understand and monitor natural environments. Current practices evaluate active learning inductively, estimating predictive performance on a held-out test set.
arXiv:2607. 06063v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Eco-acoustic monitoring generates vast volumes of audio data, making active learning a promising approach for reducing annotation effort while efficiently training reliable biodiversity classifiers.
arXiv:2606.20223v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Camera-trap monitoring in African tropical forests increasingly extends beyond closed-canopy interiors to riverbanks, clearings, and park edges. Am...
Bioacoustic foundation models rely on large-scale citizen science platforms like Xeno-Canto for geographically and ecologically diverse data. Recent work has shown that supervision alone can produce SotA species detection models when trained on this large-scale data -- however, there remains unutilized potential in the form of recording metadata readily available within these community-driven data hubs.