One of the popular segments featured on The Conversation is the Manu Minute — all about Hawaiʻi birds. It was the brainchild of one of our listeners, biology professor Patrick Hart, who reached out to HPR about three years ago.
Hart hosts the Manu Minute and runs the LOHE Bioacoustics Lab at the University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo.
For the last decade or more, he has been trying to improve how researchers track forest bird population trends. He's been getting his feet wet using artificial intelligence to do just that.
"One of the things that we need to do to be able to manage our forest birds is to have better information on where they are and how many of them there are," Hart said. "It's been really hard to get that with our traditional techniques where we send people out in the forest and count them."
Hart and his team have been recording forest soundscapes for months at a time and uploading the files to a computer. He said they've developed ways to teach a computer, using AI, how to detect every bird's song.
"We've been working with a lot of collaborators to take what the computer is saying, each species, and then to use that to estimate how the birds are doing, like their trends, are they increasing or decreasing over time," he said. "It's kind of an automated way to monitor our forest birds to improve the way we can manage them as they continue to decline around the state."
Hart said this technique is already being implemented across the islands with partners such as Haleakalā National Park. He said he's had recorders at Hakalau Forest National Wildlife Refuge for almost 10 years straight.
"We can take all those recordings that we've been storing away on the cloud, and we can run them through what we call classifiers, and there's a few steps in the methods, but we can look at how, you know, the trends in every species of bird that lives in the forest there on a daily basis or a seasonal basis, based on the number of songs that the AI identifies for each species," Hart said.
He said the technology could be used to track any animal that makes sounds — coqui frogs, bats, even fish.
"It's fairly inexpensive technology, the recorders, and then there's some costs with analysis, of course, and all that. But worth it in the long run, I think."
Hart's team is also branching out across the Pacific and will be working in Pohnpei, Palau and Guam.
This interview aired on The Conversation on Sept. 25, 2024. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. on HPR-1.
