Birdsong data from Merlin ID app to help global biodiversity project | Birds

The Merlin bird ID app will allow users to transfer their real-time bird IDs to one of the world’s largest citizen-science biodiversity projects, in an update that is hoped will help protect at-risk birds.

Since 2021, the free Merlin app, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, has been using machine learning to provide an image for every bird identified, as well as near-instant audio identification for birdsong. In the future, human-recorded bird species detections will be automatically collected in a global online database. eBird, It contains more than 2 billion bird observation records.

According to the British Trust for Ornithology, the total bird population in the UK has fallen by more than 70 million in the last 50 years. The Guardian has created a soundscape that recreates the abundance of bird song the public would hear in 1976 compared to today.

In May this year, nearly 2 million people in the UK used Merlin to identify birds in their gardens, woodlands and countryside. The calls of different birds create different patterns in the spectrograms, and Merlin is trained to recognize the patterns and attribute them to a species.

Cornell also operates the eBird platform, which was created in 2002 to collect information from citizen scientists on millions of bird sightings, making it one of the largest environmental science platforms in the world.

Jessie Barry, one of the leaders of the Merlin project, said: “The eBird mobile app will soon have the ability to upload recordings that can be saved to Merlin. Future feature improvements will provide even better connectivity to eBird systems so we can use data from what users ‘hear’ with Merlin to monitor bird populations.”

“These data help create tools that can be used to provide greater conservation, inspire support, and inform ecological management strategies.”

Currently, the app can identify 2,066 bird species, including most birds from the US, Canada, and Europe, as well as more common and widespread species from India and Central and South America.

“Collecting additional species is always an ongoing project. We have a few we’d like to add, but we’re always adding more and improving the performance of the models,” Barry said.

The app has been downloaded more than 40 million times in 240 countries, compared to 33 million downloads as of December last year. The UK has the second highest total number of users on the app, with almost 2 million users in May this year. The top 10 countries that use the application most include Canada, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands.

The Merlin app is cited by some as an opportunity to connect more people with nature and help advance conservation efforts. But there is some concern that the app may misidentify birds, and the European Bird Census Council recommends that Merlin not be used in official breeding bird surveys. EBCC has established a monitoring group to coordinate, align and integrate acoustic bird monitoring across Europe.

Merlin user Moira Forsyth, who lives in the Muir of Ord region of Scotland, said she uses the app in conjunction with other authentication methods. “We were pleasantly surprised to discover that we have a much wider range of birds here than we thought,” he said. “Armed with the app, the RSPB book on Scottish birds, my trusty old copy of the Collins Complete British Wildlife and the binoculars we keep on the kitchen windowsill, we’re getting a little better at it.”

Prof Richard Gregory, RSPB, said: “The growth in its popularity and use, especially to a new, wider and different group of people, is hugely positive. Everywhere I go I see people using Merlin, connecting with nature and learning about its birds, becoming more curious to find out more. It’s fantastic – it’s a revolution.”

But Gregory warned that the app still made identification errors and identified his dachshund as a mallard. “Unless you’re an expert, you don’t necessarily know there’s a mistake,” he said. “It’s interesting to hear that Cornell has made changes which mean recordings from Merlin will be more easily imported into eBird, so if the species recognition is accurate that’s great.” [but] When it is not, it is a problem for conservation.”

Research teams that regularly use such data sources will solve data quality challenges, Barry said. “Our ability to understand changes in bird populations will be better with more data to study than if we collected nothing at all.”