Exploring Bioacoustics With Iracambi
- Yvo Hunink de Paiva
- Sep 23, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Jun 5
This story begins not as a formal partnership, but as a personal volunteer endeavor that blossomed into something much more—a collaboration between Regen Studio and Iracambi that continues to grow.
A Volunteer's Journey into the Atlantic Rainforest - By Yvo Hunink
I embarked on a volunteer project in 2022 at Iracambi, a research center dedicated to restoring the Brazilian Atlantic Forest in Minas Gerais. Iracambi has been at the forefront of reforestation efforts, having planted thousands of trees in the Serra do Brigadeiro mountains. Their work is not just about trees but about the complete restoration of ecosystems, including the return of wildlife and educating the local population on the importance of their biome. Iracambi is exploring the concept of Smart Forests, and were open to designing a volunteer project around experimenting with sound recorders for biodiversity measurements, known as bioacoustics. This aligned perfectly with values, and the eventual fundaments on which I started Regen Studio.
Visit Iracambi's website, and if you like them be sure to donate.
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Exploring Bioacoustics: The Project
After brainstorming with Robin Lebreton, Iracambi's founder, the research question was determined to be:
What value can bioacoustics bring to monitoring forest ecosystems and how is it applied in practice?
Download the full report here:
During the preparation, the decision was made to focus on birds. Not only because the Atlantic Rainforest is the most biodiverse place on earth for bird species, but also because they can be identified through their songs relatively easily compared to other species. A desk review led to a complete list of potential bird species that could potentially be found in the area, including links to online sound databanks of some of those birds.
The equipment was bought in The Netherlands, with the Wildlife Acoustics Song Meter Micro as the chosen device, mainly for it's usability, it's price and the good record of the company, with a number of high end products that could support scale up upon success of the experiment.
A sound recorder being placed in this exact location (the old forest of the High Trail).
During the 4 weeks on site at Iracambi, the sound recording device was deployed across various locations of different forest ecosystem characteristics, capturing over 200 hours of forest sounds.
Listen to an hour of recorded rainforest from our soundbank!
A total of 8 hours of recordings were meticulously analyzed to detect bird songs and calls, building a sound bank of clusters of similar calls, that could serve future research projects.
The results were promising: 845 detections of individual birds were made, encompassing 35 different song types, and several bird species were identified, including the Little Tinamou.
However, the project also revealed the challenges of using the software tools, which often struggled with background noise and required substantial manual effort. During that time (2022), the development of AI models to support identification activities was already briefly explored, showing clear signs of development, and a number of potential partners were suggested to help remove workload for researchers.
Ultimately, these findings contributed to two grant proposals aimed at enhancing bio-acoustic monitoring capabilities at Iracambi, of which one was granted by Wildlife Acoustics, the producer of the sound recorder used in the experiment. We built the proposal together with a local NGO, called Muriqui Instituto de Biodiversidade, around the monitoring of two key species in the region. The 'araponga' and the 'muriqui', otherwise known as the Bare-throated Bellbird and the Northern-Woolly Spider Monkey. The grant consisted of some high-end equipment of Wildlife Acoustics.
In 2024 the first to use this equipment were Italian research students from the University of Bologna. Their methodology was not focused on species, but rather on measuring so-called entropy in soundscapes, which can be used to determine overall complexity of the biodiversity in sound data through certain statistical analysis. I had the pleasure to visit Iracambi for 2 weeks while they were there, and see the fruits of my experiment be used by researchers. But this time I widened my view, assisting the excentric Toni with his agroforestry maintenance, building a proposal generator with AI and exploring funding for building a green corridor with a protected area close-by.
From Volunteering to Collaboration
This volunteer experience was never meant to be connected to Regen Studio. Yet, the insights gained and the alignment of values naturally paved the way for further collaboration.
What started as a personal exploration into bioacoustics has now evolved into a deeper connection between Iracambi and Regen Studio, pushing the boundaries of how technology can support reforestation and conservation efforts and building a vision for Smart Forests. More on our collaboration with Iracambi in another story. Reach out if you want to explore Smart Forests with us.
Yvo Hunink
Founder Regen Studio & Bioacoustics Experimenter
"I loved being able to experience a forest through sound recordings. I saw so many sonograms that whilst in my last hours of dreaming in the morning, waking up in the Iracambi forest, I experienced visuals not unlike the banner of this blog."
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