"India's first open-access ecoacoustic dataset enables AI-based wildlife monitoring"
Ecoacoustics
interdisciplinary field studying soundscapes as indicators of ecosystem health and biodiversity
Biophony
sounds produced by living organisms within an ecosystem, one of three soundscape components
The scientific study of environmental sound — ecoacoustics — has roots stretching back to the late 19th century, when the earliest known bird recording was made using a captive white-rumped shama at a European zoo. What began as a curiosity of the leisured class, with gramophone records of birdsong sold commercially, has evolved into a rigorous scientific discipline. Sound, unlike sight, penetrates dense forest canopy, travels across water bodies, and captures activity at night or in conditions of low visibility — making it uniquely suited to monitoring biodiversity in complex ecosystems.
India's biodiversity monitoring infrastructure has historically relied on visual survey methods — transect walks, camera traps, and direct observation — which are labour-intensive, geographically limited, and often biased toward larger, more visible species. The country's rich acoustic biodiversity, spanning birds, amphibians, insects, bats, reptiles, and marine fauna, has remained systematically underutilised as a conservation data source. Globally, acoustic monitoring has advanced rapidly, but the training datasets underpinning machine learning models have been overwhelmingly drawn from the Global North, leaving tropical and South Asian species poorly represented in automated identification systems.
Ecoacoustics is the interdisciplinary field that studies the relationship between living organisms and their acoustic environment. It operates on the principle that soundscapes — the composite of all sounds in an ecosystem — are reliable indicators of ecological health. A rich, diverse soundscape typically signals a healthy, species-rich habitat; a simplified or degraded one may indicate habitat loss, pollution, or species decline. Three components are typically distinguished: biophony (sounds from living organisms), geophony (natural non-biological sounds like wind and rain), and anthrophony (human-generated noise).
Animals use sound for a wide range of ecological functions: mate attraction, territorial defence, predator-prey signalling, and navigation (particularly in bats and marine mammals via echolocation). By analysing these calls, researchers can infer species distribution and abundance without physically sighting the animal — a critical advantage in dense forests like those of the Western Ghats or the Northeast. …
In which of the following regions of India are you most likely to come across the 'Great Indian Hornbill' in its natural habitat?
Consider the following pairs:
Wildlife — Naturally found in
1.Blue-finned Mahseer — Cauvery River
2.Irrawaddy Dolphin — Chambal River
3.Rusty-spotted Cat — Eastern Ghats
Which of the pairs given above are correctly matched?
With reference to ecoacoustics, consider the following statements:
1.Biophony refers to sounds produced by living organisms, while anthrophony refers to human-generated noise.
2.Passive acoustic monitoring requires direct visual observation of animals to be effective.
3.Machine learning models for species identification from sound use spectrograms as input.
Which of the statements given above is/are correct?
Which of the following best explains why existing machine learning models for wildlife species identification perform poorly on Indian species?
The rediscovery of the night parrot of Australia after over a century of presumed extinction is significant in the context of conservation science because it demonstrates that:
Consider the following pairs:
Ecoacoustic term — Definition
1.Geophony — Sounds produced by living organisms
2.Biophony — Sounds from natural, non-biological sources (wind, rain, water)
3.Anthrophony — Human-generated noise in the environment
How many of the pairs given above are correctly matched?
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