Side Event

Computational Bioacoustics: New Tools for Assessing Biological Diversity

Organizer
University of York

Date and Time
21 May 2008 18:15 - 19:45

Meeting
Ninth meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP 9)

The rapid assessment of biological diversity is becoming increasingly vital for determining the effects of habitat loss and climate change on species composition. Current biological diversity assessment is time consuming, labour intensive, very intermittent and requires considerable expertise on the part of the assessors. The side event will show how recent advances in computational bioacoustics is leading to the development of new tools to achieve both rapid assessment and long term automated assessment. The event will include case studies from a range of applications including birds, bats, amphibia, insects (ecological and phytosanitory applications) and marine environment to illustrate the enormous potential for such tools. The idea for this side event was conceived at the first International Expert Meeting on IT-based Detection of Bioacoustical Patterns in Vilm, Germany in December 2007, organised by Bundesamt für Naturschutz and the Humbolt-Universität zu Berlin and Universität-Bonn.