Ecoacoustics: a biodiversity yardstick as a facilitating tool for nature positive food production

A biodiversity-positive food production system requires a balanced interplay of pest and prey, for a successful production system. However, quantifying the impact of a biodiverse ecosystem on pest management and farm production is a major challenge in ecological farming systems. The main issue being on the measurement of biodiversity. It is often too time-consuming, too expensive, or both.

In the last decade, automated ecoacoustic surveying has emerged as relevant technology for large-scale monitoring of natural as well as urban habitats. Acoustic recording devices facilitate environment monitoring over lengthy temporal and spatial scales, making acoustic monitoring a relatively economically accessible method compared to traditional surveying and biodiversity monitoring approaches. The automatization of such systems would yield continuous and inexpensive data, allowing actions to be adjusted on a micro-temporal scale. For that matter machine learning, including deep learning, is being increasingly applied to acoustic data, to automatically identify a range of sounds, from different birds species, to amphibians, grasshoppers and humans.

To make the task of measuring biodiversity in farming systems swifter and more tangible from a producer perspective, we will use ecoaccoustic monitoring as a tool to quantify the impact of a bio-diverse ecosystem on pest management, and finally on-farm production, in ecological farming systems.

A biodiverse farming ecosystem must include natural counter-balances against such pests and producers must be able to access this measurement to be able to include it in the production process. A direct intended impact of this project is to design automated systems for acoustic biodiversity monitoring and connect that to farm yield. The aim is to quantify the benefits of a balanced bio-positive system against an imbalanced one.