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Comment by ImaCake | Hacker News Reader

People might be interested in BirdWeather (https://app.birdweather.com/) which collates data from people's bird listening stations (raspberry pi's with a mic and a modest NN to classify what is heard). Basically, the technology for this has already arrived as consumer tech.

As someone who is a fairly serious volunteer birdwatcher, we could absolutely do with more of this. There are not enough bird surveyors (paid or volunteer) and audio moths hooked up to AI capable of filling in the gaps are badly needed to support conservation and re-wilding efforts.

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I thought about setting up such a device outside of my window (there's a lot of birds nearby), and the obvious concern of setting up a mic in your house and uploading recordings is privacy.

I found two privacy policies related to Birdweather:

1. https://www.birdweather.com/privacy

2. https://birdnet.cornell.edu/privacy-policy/

The first one mentions the following:

> You may choose to keep your audio recordings private, so that other Bird Weather users cannot access or listen to those recordings. This is configured on the Settings page.

Except Birdweather explicitly mentions they're based on Cornell's BirdNET, whose privacy policy (#2) says:

> BirdNET is an artificial neural network that identifies bird species by sound. Our servers process small audio snippets recorded with the BirdNET app to detect and recognize bird sounds. We store all submitted recordings on our servers. Therefore, we advise users not to submit any audio recordings that they might consider private. The collection of audio data helps us to improve BirdNET and we will use those recordings for research purposes only.

Seems like Birdweather would benefit from clarifying how their privacy policy plays together with BirdNET's.

Seems clear to me:

> Third-Party Research: We share the bird detections and audio as well as labeled data with the Cornell University Laboratory of Ornithology, so that they may use such data for scientific research and to help improve the accuracy of the bird sound detection.

You can set the audio recordings to be inaccessible for other Bird Weather users. Ie. by default audio is shared on the website, but you can turn that off. Independently, they also share the data with Cornell.

> BirdNET is an artificial neural network that identifies bird species by sound.

A while ago there was an HN thread raving about how Seek by iNaturalist was fun (true!) and did such a good job of identifying whatever it was you were looking at (maybe!) and not overstepping the bounds of what it could know for sure. (See below!)

So I set up an account and I tried it out.

It's pretty clear that Seek places far more weight on giving you a full species-level identification than it does on whether it can be confident that that identification is correct. I guess it's possible that the stand of groundcover I found on the shore of an artificial lake in a public park is a different species from the stand of groundcover with identical coloration and shape about 12 inches away... but I doubt it. Even if they were different species, I'm pretty sure my low-resolution images of two stands of plants with no flowers or seeds wouldn't be enough for an expert to tell them apart.

In a parallel occurrence, I took a photo of a local beetle that Seek identified as "Strawberry seed beetle", harpalus rufipes. I uploaded that to iNaturalist proper (labeled "beetles"; I already didn't trust the identification) and checked out some nearby photos. A very similar-looking beetle had been photographed in my area and identified as harpalus sinicus. So I left a comment asking how the tagger could tell that this was sinicus and not some other kind of harpalus. And I got a response, saying "I'm not trained in entomology and I couldn't explain what the difference is. But me and my friend think this is sinicus."

I harbor a sneeking suspicion that the "friend" was Seek.

They advertise that Seek is trained on labels from iNaturalist. But those labels appear to be generated in large part by Seek. Something needs to change.

As a botanist, I have been pretty impressed with Seek's plant IDs. If it is uncertain, it will almost always only ID to genus or family. It doesn't always get IDs right, but it's good.

I've been using BirdNet-Pi for a while and it's great fun. I'm a little confused about the commercial offering from BirdWeather - the PUC looks like a neat product, but I understood most of the BirdNet stuff to be Creative Commons NonCommercial. Maybe there's some nuance about how they're using it, or maybe some pieces have a more lenient open source license?

The PUC folks obtained a separate commercial license from the Cornell Lab of O.

Thank you for posting this. I'm going to see about setting up one of these for my mom, who is a VERY avid birder (I already have the Pi and outdoor enclosure). It looks like one slightly difficult issue is finding a good weatherproof microphone that works with the Pi.

How does one become a volunteer birdwatcher? Who are you volunteering with?

I volunteer with Birdlife Australia. If you are in the USA I think it’s called the Audubon Society. They will have a number of surveying programs running at any given time.

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