Sebastian Hoefer
@taiapo.bsky.social
880 followers 310 following 13 posts
Wildlife Biologist with a soft spot for scaly friends Postdoc studying ecoacoustics, conservation & biodiversity 🦎🐸🐨🦜🎶 linktr.ee/taiapo
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taiapo.bsky.social
Hi everyone!
I’m a postdoctoral researcher working on #AcousticEcology at JCU in Australia. In a nutshell, I listen to the sounds of the bush to figure out what animals are around.

Here’s a video of one of the most adorable frogs calling, the Bornean tree hole frog (Metaphrynella sundana).
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
daniteixeira.bsky.social
I'm excited to share our new (in press) paper on vocal individuality and acoustic recognition. We looked at Red-tailed Black-Cockatoos, Little Penguins, Little Owls, Tree Pipits and Chiffchaffs, with promising results. #bioacoustics #vocalindividuality www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...
Acoustic recognition of individuals in closed and open bird populations
Passive acoustic monitoring is firmly established as an effective non-invasive technique for wildlife monitoring. The analysis of animal vocalizations…
www.sciencedirect.com
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
drbrunkosaurus.bsky.social
Who's your indicator species actually indicating for? That's what we set out to answer in our new paper using over 800k hours of #acoustic data! 🧪🦤🔊🌐🌎

Spoiler: Indicator species can be effective #biodiversity surrogates, but spatial scale matters!

Check it out here: doi.org/10.1111/cobi...
taiapo.bsky.social
Yeah Lyrebirds are amazing! They could definitely cause trouble for AI. But they do throw in lyrebird typical calls every so often and so giving AI longer audio clips and so more context of calls may help. Otherwise we may have to tell the AI that a reversing truck is actually also a lyrebird haha
taiapo.bsky.social
That’s actually a very interesting question and problem. Out of the box it depends on the training data to detect the slightest nuances. Another way may also be increasing the context length of audio clips as mimics often go through a whole bunch of calls which could be a way to distinguish.
taiapo.bsky.social
BirdNET embeddings can identify new sound classes beyond its training set, aiding invasive species monitoring, biodiversity surveys, and detecting threatened species across vertebrate groups while requiring minimal call examples and manual validation.

Find out more: doi.org/10.3389/fevo... 🔈🪶🦊🐸🦎🧪🌎
Frontiers | The use of BirdNET embeddings as a fast solution to find novel sound classes in audio recordings
doi.org
taiapo.bsky.social
Absolutely agree. Sometimes, it’s challenging to find a good balance between high-quality data and minimising any negative impact on the animals. Important to prioritise the animals as much as possible!
taiapo.bsky.social
When interacting with wildlife we should ask: “How might the animal be affected by my actions?”


🔎 We explored how juvenile green turtles respond to handling stress by using animal-borne cameras & drones

🌟Turtles swam excessively for 90 min after release

Find out more: doi.org/10.1002/ece3... 🌎🐢🧪
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
markuseichhorn.bsky.social
A major challenge in restoration ecology is the widespread belief that there is a correct natural community for any given location, and that identifying it is the first step in recreating it. 1/6
Temperate rain forest image taken from the Wildlife Trusts website. This is one of the most contentious habitat types to define, partly because so little remains in Europe, which makes it a difficult target for restoration. https://www.wildlifetrusts.org/habitats/woodland/temperate-rainforest
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
daxkellie.bsky.social
✅ Do you use R or Python?
✅ Are you an ecologist/biologist?

Then you might find our website ALA Labs useful!

ALA Labs is full of how-to articles to visualise or analyse biodiversity data. Some are for beginners, others are advanced/experimental 😀

labs.ala.org.au

🧪🌏 #rstats #python #quartopub
ALA Labs frontpage & text logo. ALA LABS text is in white, formatted as off-centre stacked text. Underneath is smaller text, "Experiments in code, data analysis & visualisation from the Atlas of Living Australia." The background is green grass with a Southern Brown Tree Frog in the middle, hanging onto the grass. It has a darker brown top and lighter brown underside. The frog's eye is a rich dark yellow, with a black pupil in the shape of an oval, stretching from the left to right side of the eye An animated scroll through an ALA Labs post, showing code, text and visuals to make a data visualisation in R. The article is on how to make a hexagon map of Australia, where each hexagon is an area of Australia, and each point in the hexagon is positioned and coloured to represent a species. Examples of dataviz that ALA Labs posts show how to make in R. They are colourful and fun. One of them is even 3D!
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
daniteixeira.bsky.social
#Bioacoustics researchers: what's your go-to software for viewing/validating/labelling large datasets? Anything that can handle info from multiple audio files (i.e. 100s of files) in one place, display them all nicely for easy viewing?
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
carbonick.bsky.social
That @ipbes.bsky.social report is so relevant and massively important. From policy makers to individuals, pinpointing the underlying causes of the dual climate/biodiversity crisis and their interconnectedness will be key to reach tangible solutions. Solid work from all scientists involved! 🌐🧪
Media Release: IPBES Transformative Change Assessment
Summary for Policymakers, photos, ‘B-roll’ & media resources
www.ipbes.net
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
xeno-canto.bsky.social
cool. XC will open up for strongly labelled recordings like these somewhere in 2025. #bioacoustics
arxiv-sound.bsky.social
A two-stage object detection model, trained on a new open-access dataset of 13,359 annotated bird vocalizations, achieved accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art systems despite using a smaller dataset.
NBM: an Open Dataset for the Acoustic Monitoring of Nocturnal Migratory Birds in Europe
Louis Airale, Adrien Pajot, Juliette Linossier
arxiv.org
taiapo.bsky.social
Also love to be added, thank you!
taiapo.bsky.social
Could you add me please? 🙂
taiapo.bsky.social
Here's a snap (and the recorded song) of a Superb Fairywren from the most recent #fieldwork trip in southern NSW. There were four males and over a dozen females around a pretty small body of water. Was super fun to watch them all and listen to their chatter for a bit 🔈🪶
taiapo.bsky.social
Sorry I won’t be much help with Armenian birds but I was curious what software you used to visualise the audio here?
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
acanthoplus.bsky.social
Due to the distinctive alarm call of the kookas I am now aware of how many Bobtails cross my road almost every day. Once it was a dugite and once a Varanus tristis but the fury was the same #WildOz and
Reposted by Sebastian Hoefer
carbonick.bsky.social
#Microplastics: billions of vehicles worldwide shed an estimated 6 million tonnes of tyre fragments every year. These tiny flakes of plastic eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food.
Car tyres shed a quarter of all microplastics in the environment – urgent action is needed
Tiny flakes of plastic, generated by the wear and tear of normal driving, eventually accumulate in the soil, in rivers and lakes, and even in our food.
theconversation.com
taiapo.bsky.social
Hey fellow ecosound nerds! Could I please be added? I work on acoustic ecology in Australia. Trying to effectively apply acoustic monitoring for long-term, large-scale biodiversity assessments.
taiapo.bsky.social
Hi everyone!
I’m a postdoctoral researcher working on #AcousticEcology at JCU in Australia. In a nutshell, I listen to the sounds of the bush to figure out what animals are around.

Here’s a video of one of the most adorable frogs calling, the Bornean tree hole frog (Metaphrynella sundana).