Monitoring of soniferous animals

At Center for Sustainable Landscapes under Global Change (https://sustainscapes.org) we provide the scientific basis and local, spatially explicit, sustainable solutions while accounting for both historical, ongoing, and future human pressures in a globalized world. The international team of biologist, agroecologist, social scientists and data scientists is working together to develop solutions for a sustainable future and land use. Part of our mission is to develop scalable tools that allow us to understand current and future changes in biodiversity and land use across Denmark.

Animal sounds represent a rich source of information about the community of species living in a given area, their activities, and possibly also their abundance. Continous development and improvement of small autonomous sound recorders to collected sound recordings and machine learning methods to analyse these data makes it possible to harnes that rich source of information and to learn more about the various sound-producing animals. Scalling-up that information will help assessing the state and health of ecosystems.

We are looking for highly motivated students with an interest in monitoring of soniferous animals (birds, bats, amphibians, insects) at any levels of education and ECTS requirements (10-60 ECTS, Bachelor, Master, etc.). You will take part in the development of an infrastructure that comprises of various sound sensors at our field sites and the integration of the collected data from the acoustic monitoring into a data pipeline for the assessment and long-term monitoring of our model ecosystems. The infrastructure and data streams as well as the overall reseserach topic, called SoundScapes, will give options to various larger or smaller subprojects which can be adjusted according to individual interests and skills. The project may involve collaborations within the interdisciplinary team and research fields at SustainScapes, e.g., ecology, remote sensing, data science, as well as important players in the field of acoustic monitoring, e.g., hardware providers (AudioMoth, ecoPI) and software developers (BirdNet).

Your profile matches several of the points below:

• Interest in biodiversity monitoring
• Interest in animal sounds
• Interest in big data analysis
• Eager to learn
• Dedicated birder
• Knows amphibians

What you can learn:

• Adapt, deploy and maintain different types of wildlife sound recorders
• Collect and manage big audio data
• Detect and visualize sound events and turn them into meaningful biodiversity reports

Contact:

You will mainly work with Pavel Linhart ([email protected]) under the supervision of Signe Normand ([email protected]). When interested or if you have any questions regarding the potential project, please contact Pavel Linhart and cc Signe Normand in the email.

The project proposal has been submitted 01.07.2025