Raspberry Pi based recording system for acoustic monitoring of bird species

Severe degradation of ecosystems due to human encroachment and climate change call for close monitoring of the ecosystems in order to conserve them. Ecosystems have a lot of acoustic data that can be used to study changes taking place in them remotely. In this paper, we present an acoustic system that is based on the Raspberry Pi and is used to collect audio recordings for use in acoustic monitoring of birds. The system has been designed to work optimally in the field. It has been able to collect good quality acoustic data of several bird species during its pilot deployment. Acoustic data collected over a reasonable amount of time will be used to create datasets that will be used in developing machine learning models for automatic classification of bird species. This will offer a tool to provide continuous monitoring of ecosystems.National Research Fund Kenya (NRF