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Birdsong data from Merlin ID app to help global biodiversity project
A chiffchaff ( Phylloscopus collybita ). The Merlin app uses machine learning to provide an almost instantaneous sound-identification service for birdsong. Photograph: Andyworks/Getty View image in fullscreen A chiffchaff ( Phylloscopus collybita ). The Merlin app uses machine learning to provide an almost instantaneous sound-identification service for birdsong. Photograph: Andyworks/Getty Birdsong data from Merlin ID app to help global biodiversity project Cornell Lab for Ornithology plans data linkup between app and population monitoring on eBird platform The Merlin bird ID app will allow users to feed real-time bird identifications into one of the world’s biggest citizen-science biodiversity projects in an update it is hoped will aid conservation of at-risk birds. Since 2021, the free Merlin app, created by the Cornell Lab for Ornithology, has used machine learning to provide an almost instantaneous sound-identification service for birdsong, along with an image for each bird identified. In future, the detections of bird species recorded by people will be automatically collected on the global online database eBird, which contains more than 2bn bird observation records. ‘It brings you closer to the natural world’: the rise of the Merlin birdsong identifying app Read more In the UK, the total bird population has fallen by more than 70 million in the last 50 years, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. The Guardian has created an audio soundscape that recreates the abundance of birdsong the public would have heard in 1976, compared with today. Almost 2 million people in the UK used Merlin in May this year to identify birds in their gardens, woodland and in the countryside. Different birdsong makes distinct patterns on spectrograms and Merlin has been trained to recognise the shapes and attribute them to a species. Cornell also runs the eBird platform, which was created in 2002 to gather information from citizen scientists of their millions of bird observations, building one of the world’s biggest environmental science platforms. View image in fullscreen The Merlin app has been downloaded more than 40m times in 240 countries. Composite: cornell.edu Jessie Barry, one of the leaders of the Merlin project, said: “The eBird mobile app will soon have the ability to upload recordings, which can be recorded in Merlin. Upcoming feature developments will make an even better link to the eBird systems so that we can use the data from what users ‘hear’ with Merlin to monitor bird populations. “This data helps create tools that can be used to further conservation, inspire support and inform ecological management strategies.” At present, the app can identify 2,066 bird species, including most birds in the US, Canada and Europe, and the more common and widespread species in India and across Central and South America. “It is always an ongoing project to collect additional species. There’s a few we would like to add but we are always adding more and impro
