What is it about?
There is a growing strand of citizen science that uses human intelligence to categorise and create labelled datasets for ecological science. We tested whether using words to describe sounds (onomatopoeia) might be a reliable way to categorise bird calls.
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Why is it important?
Bio-acoustic research has the potential to greatly scale up ecological discovery, prediction, and management. However, even with the great strides being made in computing techniques, datasets still need to be labelled with human intelligence. While citizen scientists are helping to label these recordings, there is need for more enjoyable and intuitive interfaces to support this work and reduce the analytic bottleneck. We tested whether onomatopoeia might be reliably added to the suite of methods used to classify natural sounds, and found that it could be, with some provisos.
Perspectives
Writing this, I was struck by the long history of using words to describe animals and particularly, birds. Many bird names are ancient adaptations of the sounds that they make! There are also so many ways to engage people in the work of science, which is often quite tedious. I hope this article leads designers to consider how more engaging interfaces might be made to support citizen science.
Kellie Vella
Queensland University of Technology
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Describing the sounds of nature: Using onomatopoeia to classify bird calls for citizen science, PLoS ONE, May 2021, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0250363.
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