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: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...
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:2609.15221v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring can measure biodiversity at larger scales, but time--frequency annotation of animal vocalizations is expensive, site-spec...
The study examined how variation in the interpulse interval (IPI) of bat vocalizations affects deep‑learning classification. Two datasets—one preserving natural IPI timing and another normalizing call spacing to 50 ms—were used to fine‑tune EfficientNet‑B0 and PaSST models. Results showed that IPI normalization had mixed effects: PaSST performance remained stable while EfficientNet improved, yet models trained on natural IPI data performed better on natural test sets, indicating limited but non‑negligible influence of natural IPI variation.
CUBE introduces a class‑conditioned evidence framework for open‑set insect species recognition, modeling unknownness around each known species rather than as a single global unknown class. By evaluating test samples relative to their most similar known species, CUBE enables local rejection of visually confusable unknown insects and incorporates auxiliary species as shadow references and taxonomic candidate calibration. The extended CUBE‑E variant adds a lightweight location‑consistency term when ecological metadata is available, achieving state‑of‑the‑art AUROC scores on the Open‑Insect C‑America benchmark while preserving high closed‑set accuracy.
arXiv:2606. 13236v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Passive acoustic monitoring holds great promise for ecological inference, yet existing automated tools are typically narrowly trained and non-transferable.
arXiv:2609.35863v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Modern bioacoustic foundation models like Perch and BirdNET can identify species with high discriminative accuracy, yet their confidence scores are o...
arXiv:2607. 03304v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable analysis of bird vocalisations in passive acoustic monitoring requires models handling multiple, imbalanced annotation targets.
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.
CoarseSoundNet is a deep learning framework designed to classify ecological soundscapes into biophony, geophony, and anthropophony under realistic passive acoustic monitoring conditions. The study systematically explores model architectures, training data composition, and evaluation strategies, finding that adding more domain‑similar data, a silence class, and post‑hoc calibration improves performance. An ecological case study shows that pre‑filtering recordings with CoarseSoundNet produces acoustic index trends similar to ground‑truth filtering, though the impact on avian alpha‑diversity relationships is modest.
This paper introduces an automated one‑shot bird call classification pipeline tailored for rare species that lack large training datasets. By leveraging embedding spaces from large bird classification networks and a cosine‑similarity classifier, the system incorporates filtering and denoising steps to detect calls with minimal data. The approach was validated on simulated Xeno‑Canto recordings and on the critically endangered tooth‑billed pigeon, achieving 1.0 recall and 0.95 accuracy. "whyItMatters":"The system enables conservationists to monitor endangered species with only a few recordings, filling a gap left by existing large‑scale classifiers."
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.