Cacophony Project

Science for Nature is an active supporter of the Cacophony Project www.cacophony.org.nz

Lead by Grant Ryan, Cacophony is pioneering the use of technology to develop tools to monitor the health of New Zealand’s bird populations and to develop more effective pest suppression methods.

It has developed a bird monitor which makes periodic recordings of birdsong and uploads them to the cloud with a time and location tag. This can be used to track changes of birdsong over time and hence the health of bird populations in a given area. Cacophony is exploring the use of AI to automatically identify individual bird species. It is hoped that this tool will eventually replace the traditional human two minute birdsong survey with an accurate and objective measurement method.

Cacophony has combined thermal cameras and artificial intelligence to automatically track and identify individual terrestrial pest species such as possums, stoats, rats and hedgehogs. Thermal cameras are significantly more sensitive than traditionally used trail cameras and the addition of AI means pests are identified, classified and tagged in real time. There is no wading through hours of camera footage.

Cacophony has used hundreds of hours of thermal camera footage to determine how pests interact with traditional traps and then used this knowledge to develop an innovative trap which trials are already showing a kill rate per trap night 5 times those of traditional traps.

As these traps are refined and developed they will be an ideal tool to suppress pests in environments where poison cannot be employed.