A team of scientists is studying the sound of the forest in Ecuador to learn how artificial intelligence (AI) could follow animal life in recovering environments.
When scientists want to measure new forest growth, they can study large areas of land with tools like satellites. But understanding how fast and in what number wildlife is returning to an area is more difficult. Sometimes it requires an expert to listen through sound recordings and pick out animal calls.
Jorg Muller, an expert on birds, wondered if there was a different way. So, he turned to bioacoustics (生物声学), which uses sound to learn more about animal life and their living environments. Muller and his team recorded wildlife sounds in Ecuador. They first had experts listen to the recordings and list the sounds of different animals. Then, they examined the sound quality to measure the environment. Finally, they ran two weeks of recordings through an AI computer program trained to understand 75 different bird calls.
The program was able to pick out the calls on which it was trained. However, scientists wondered if the program could correctly identify the number of different kinds of plants and animals in each environment. To see if the program could do that, the team used two different controls. One was from the experts who listened to the recordings, and the second was based on examples from each environment, which can be used to understand biodiversity (生物多样性).
Since the number of sounds that are found to be used to train is limited, the AI program could only identify one-fourth of the bird calls experts could. But it was still able to correctly measure biodiversity levels in each environment, the study said. It also said the results show the AI program is a powerful tool to measure the recovery of animal societies in some forests. The study showed that biodiversity found from recordings can be measured in a cost-effective and complete way and measure environments.
There are still areas for improvement, including the lack of animal sounds on which to train AI models. And the method can only catch animals that use sound to communicate.
【小题1】What does the study focus on?| A．Studying plant growth. | B．Observing birds’ behavior. |
| C．Understanding AI’s effect on wildlife. | D．Measuring wildlife recovery. |
| A．Bioacoustics. | B．Satellite recording. |
| C．Sound recording by AI. | D．Direct observation by experts. |
| A．Identifying plant species. | B．Tracking weather change. |
| C．Measuring biodiversity levels. | D．Identifying all the bird calls. |
| A．Measuring more bird environments. |
| B．Catching animals that use sound to communicate. |
| C．Training the program on a wider variety of sounds. |
| D．Having experts study more and understand bird calls. |
