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Xeno-canto

From Wikipedia, in a visual modern way
xeno-canto
Type of site
Audio clip sharing
Available in
  • English
  • Dutch
  • Polish
URLwww.xeno-canto.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedMay 30, 2005; 17 years ago (2005-05-30)[1]
Current statusActive

xeno-canto is a citizen science project and repository in which volunteers record, upload and annotate recordings of birdsong and bird calls. Since it began in 2005, it has collected over 575,000 sound recordings from more than 10,000 species worldwide, and has become one of the biggest collections of bird sounds in the world.[1] All the recordings are published under one of the Creative Commons licenses,[2] including some with open licences. Each recording on the website is accompanied by a spectrogram and location data on a map displaying geographical variation.

Data from xeno-canto has been re-used in many (a few thousand) scientific papers.[3][4][5][6] It has also been the source of data for an annual challenge on automatic birdsong recognition ("BirdCLEF") since 2014, conducted as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.[7]

The website is supported by a number of academic and birdwatching institutions worldwide, with its primary support being in the Netherlands.[8]

Discover more about Xeno-canto related topics

Citizen science

Citizen science

Citizen science is scientific research conducted with participation from the public. There are variations in the exact definition of citizen science, with different individuals and organizations having their own specific interpretations of what citizen science encompasses. Citizen science is used in a wide range of areas of study, with most citizen science research publications being in the fields of biology and conservation. There are different applications and functions of citizen science in research projects. Citizen science can be used as a methodology where public volunteers help in collecting and classifying data, improving the scientific community's capacity. Citizen science can also involve more direct involvement from the public, with communities initiating projects researching environment and health hazards in their own communities. Participation in citizen science projects also educates the public about the scientific process and increases awareness about different topics. Some schools have students participate in citizen science projects for this purpose as a part of the teaching curriculums.

Information repository

Information repository

In information technology, an information repository or simply a repository is "a central place in which an aggregation of data is kept and maintained in an organized way, usually in computer storage." It "may be just the aggregation of data itself into some accessible place of storage or it may also imply some ability to selectively extract data."

Bird vocalization

Bird vocalization

Bird vocalization includes both bird calls and bird songs. In non-technical use, bird songs are the bird sounds that are melodious to the human ear. In ornithology and birding, songs are distinguished by function from calls.

Species

Species

In biology, a species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate sexes or mating types can produce fertile offspring, typically by sexual reproduction. It is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. Other ways of defining species include their karyotype, DNA sequence, morphology, behaviour, or ecological niche. In addition, paleontologists use the concept of the chronospecies since fossil reproduction cannot be examined.

Creative Commons

Creative Commons

Creative Commons (CC) is an American non-profit organization and international network devoted to educational access and expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright licenses, known as Creative Commons licenses, free of charge to the public. These licenses allow authors of creative works to communicate which rights they reserve and which rights they waive for the benefit of recipients or other creators. An easy-to-understand one-page explanation of rights, with associated visual symbols, explains the specifics of each Creative Commons license. Content owners still maintain their copyright, but Creative Commons licenses give standard releases that replace the individual negotiations for specific rights between copyright owner (licensor) and licensee, that are necessary under an "all rights reserved" copyright management.

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum

Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum

The Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum, or CLEF, is an organization promoting research in multilingual information access. Its specific functions are to maintain an underlying framework for testing information retrieval systems and to create repositories of data for researchers to use in developing comparable standards. The organization holds a conference every September in Europe since a first constituting workshop in 2000. From 1997 to 1999, TREC, the similar evaluation conference organised annually in the USA, included a track for the evaluation of Cross-Language IR for European languages. This track was coordinated jointly by NIST and by a group of European volunteers that grew over the years. At the end of 1999, a decision by some of the participants was made to transfer the activity to Europe and set it up independently. The aim was to expand coverage to a larger number of languages and to focus on a wider range of issues, including monolingual system evaluation for languages other than English. Over the years, CLEF has been supported by a number of various EU funded projects and initiatives.

Birdwatching

Birdwatching

Birdwatching, or birding, is the observing of birds, either as a recreational activity or as a form of citizen science. A birdwatcher may observe by using their naked eye, by using a visual enhancement device like binoculars or a telescope, by listening for bird sounds, or by watching public webcams.

Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands, informally Holland, is a country located in northwestern Europe with overseas territories in the Caribbean. It is the largest of four constituent countries of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Netherlands consists of twelve provinces; it borders Germany to the east, and Belgium to the south, with a North Sea coastline to the north and west. It shares maritime borders with the United Kingdom, Germany and Belgium in the North Sea. The country's official language is Dutch, with West Frisian as a secondary official language in the province of Friesland. Dutch, English and Papiamento are official in the Caribbean territories.

History

xeno-canto, which translates to "strange sound", is a sounds-only project seeking to highlight sounds of birds, rather than images or videos. xeno-canto was launched on May 30, 2005, by Bob Planqué, a mathematical biologist at VU University Amsterdam, and Willem-Pier Vellinga, a physicist who now consults for a global materials technology company.[9] At the time of the launch, the site held recordings of only about 160 species and originally aimed to collect recordings of birds from Central and South America.[1]

Growth

xeno-canto has now become global, expanding its coverage to North America, Africa and Asia, and finally to Europe and Australasia. By 2017, the data collection showed significant growth, containing about 360,000 recordings of about 9,750 bird species (which is nearly 90 percent of all bird species).[9][10] Nevertheless, the collection is still far from complete. There are about 1,000 missing species, and for many species, there are only a few recordings, meaning they lack the variation in repertoire and dialect that the species display.[9]

Goals

xeno-canto aims to utilize the capabilities of the internet to improve the general popularity, accessibility, and knowledge of bird sounds.[1] So far, the recordings on xeno-canto have seen use in a variety of different ways including being featured on the Aviation Information System of India,[11] contributing to the STERNA project,[12] and being included in a Norwegian University's database.[13]

Since its founding, the website has set a number of set principles in order to keep the service community-driven.[1] These principles include:

  • Anybody can contribute to the project. Aside from a few restrictions on the file size, users can upload any bird sound they find interesting. On top of uploading recordings, users can also write articles, comment on recording achievements, and even contribute to the website's code.
  • Recordings are shared. The Creative Commons licenses implemented by the website promote sharing.[14] The bird sounds uploaded are intended to be re-used. Users can download individual recordings found when browsing or access the entire collection's database.
  • Recordings can be challenged. Fellow users can flag a recording as having an incorrect identification. The recording is then reviewed until agreed upon by the community, and the flag is reset by administrators. This process can vary in length, but most often takes a few days.[10]

Source: "Xeno-canto", Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, (2023, February 4th), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeno-canto.

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Further Reading

Arctic tern

Wood sandpiper

Pied avocet

Little bustard

Brambling

Twite

Common linnet

Gull-billed tern

Bird vocalization

Pine warbler

Bioacoustics

Boat-tailed grackle

Green ibis

Canary Islands chiffchaff

Crested ibis

Semicollared hawk

Chestnut-crowned antpitta

Pohnpei flycatcher
References
  1. ^ a b c d e "About Xeno Canto". xeno-canto. Retrieved 2019-04-16.
  2. ^ "Terms of Use". xeno-canto. Retrieved 2013-01-07.
  3. ^ Brumm, H. & Naguib, M. (2009), "Environmental acoustics and the evolution of bird song", Advances in the Study of Behavior, 40: 1–33, doi:10.1016/S0065-3454(09)40001-9
  4. ^ Weir, J.T. & Wheatcroft, D. (2011), "A latitudinal gradient in rates of evolution of avian syllable diversity and song length", Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278 (1712): 1713–1720, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.2037, PMC 3081773, PMID 21068034
  5. ^ Stowell, D.F. & Plumbley, M. D. (2014), "Automatic large-scale classification of bird sounds is strongly improved by unsupervised feature learning", PeerJ, 2: e488, arXiv:1405.6524, Bibcode:2014arXiv1405.6524S, doi:10.7717/peerj.488, PMC 4106198, PMID 25083350
  6. ^ Stowell, D.F.; Musevic,S.; Bonada,J. & Plumbley, M. D. (2013), "Improved multiple birdsong tracking with distribution derivative method and Markov renewal process clustering", 2013 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing: 468–472, arXiv:1302.3462, Bibcode:2013arXiv1302.3462S, doi:10.1109/ICASSP.2013.6637691, hdl:10230/41749, ISBN 978-1-4799-0356-6, S2CID 3539066
  7. ^ BirdCLEF 2019 webpage
  8. ^ "Colophon and Credits". xeno-canto. Retrieved 2013-01-07.
  9. ^ a b c "Science | The Guardian". the Guardian. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  10. ^ a b "www.xeno-canto.org: a decade on".{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  11. ^ "About AVIS – IBIS - IBIS". Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  12. ^ "Members". www.sterna-net.eu. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  13. ^ "Linnet (Linaria cannabina) -> Crossbill (Linaria cannabina) - BirdID's Bird Guide - Nord University - Birdid". www.birdid.no. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
  14. ^ "When we share, everyone wins". Creative Commons. Retrieved 2021-03-15.
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