Lauren Wick reached out to us in late 2024 having just completed a Masters degree in environmental observation through remote sensing and GIS.  During her studies she discovered a special interest in bioacoustics and stumbled across our project when she researched bioacoustics projects in the Midwest.

Without all those happy coincidences this project would never have happened.  Lauren wrote the front end that you’ll see in these videos and I scrunged together the back end infrastructure.

Take a few minutes to watch Lauren walk through a few scenarios that give you a feel for what BirdOMatic can do.  I am constantly gobsmacked by how cool this project is.  I hope you will be too.

Where and when will I see a specific bird?

Watch this video first.  BirdOMatic started as a project to make it easier possible to navigate all 40 million plus IDs that fell out of the BirdNET-Analyzer the first time I ran all our data through it.  I totally failed at analyzing the data with my usual tools (Excel, mySQL, etc) and this was the first puzzler I presented to Lauren to solve when she reached out to us.

You’ll see why I’m so keen on the name of our project.  BirdOMatic!  It slices!  It dices!

(6 minute video)

What birds might I see at a specific location next week?

This is another great demo of the slicing and dicing capabilities of BirdOMatic.

In this video Lauren walks us through how we can sift through the data to figure out what birds might show up at a location if we were to take people there on a hike.

(6 minute video)

Downloading a video spectrogram of a specific observation

Let’s say we’ve found an ID (out of the zillions that are in the archive) and we want to share a video spectrogram with somebody (so they can see exactly where the call starts and ends).  Lauren first takes us through the steps we might follow to get to the that ID (one out of zillions) and then shows how to download and view a movie spectrogram of it.  Note that we’ve got handy shortcuts to the Cornell Macaulay library spectrograms for the species so’s to make it easier to determine whether the ID is correct.

(3 minute video)

Finding a high quality file containing a specific species 

Our annual Seasons videos which feature ambient audio from this project; but finding high quality audio by sifting through thousands of hours of files has always been really tedious.  In addition, Marcie often includes pictures of birds and I love to be able to find that call with extra bonus points if I can find a call that matches the location and month of her picture.  I asked Lauren to build me a tool to make all that easier.

This requires a whole new view of the data that is file-focused rather than ID-focused.  First we gotta be able to screen for a good file (low wind speed, lots of observations and high average quality of the observations).  Then we gotta find some good observations.  Oh, by the way, we gotta be able to merge a whole new weather-observations dataset into the mix.

(9 minute video)

Exploring bioacoustic file details starting from an individual observation

Sometimes I just stumble across a really neat observation and I’d like to be able to see what else is going on in the hour (file) that it came from.

Easy peasey!

(4 minute video)

Tips N Tricks: Multiple column sorting

This capability is built into the libraries that Lauren used to build the app, so this works on all the tables.  REALLY handy!

(2 minute video)

Tips N Tricks: Understanding the species-specific drilldown histogram

This gizmo was new to me and has some hidden capabilities that don’t jump right out at me in the beginning.

(4 minute video)