Birdsong data from Merlin ID application to aid global biodiversity project | Birds

The Merlin bird ID app will allow users to feed real-time bird identification into one of the world’s largest citizen science projects in an update that is hoped to help the conservation of endangered birds.

As of 2021, the free Merlin app, created by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, used machine learning to provide a quick audio identification service for birdsong, along with a photo of each identified bird. In the future, bird sightings recorded by people will be automatically collected in the eBird online database, which contains more than 2bn bird sighting records.

In the UK, the number of birds has fallen by more than 70 million in the last 50 years, according to the British Trust for Ornithology. The Guardian has created an audioscape that recreates the abundance of songs the public would have heard in 1976, compared to today.

Around 2 million people in the UK are using Merlin in May this year to identify birds in their gardens, woodlands and countryside. Different birdsongs create different patterns in the spectrograms and Merlin is trained to recognize the patterns and categorize them.

Cornell also operates the eBird platform, which was created in 2002 to collect information from citizen scientists about their millions of bird observations, creating one of the world’s largest environmental science platforms.

Jessie Barry, one of the Merlin project leaders, said: “The eBird mobile app will soon have the ability to upload recordings, not recorded in Merlin. Future feature improvements will enable an even better link to eBird systems so we can use data from what users ‘hear’ through Merlin to monitor bird populations.”

“This data helps develop tools that can be used to advance conservation, encourage support and inform environmental management strategies.”

Currently, the app can identify 2,066 bird species, including many birds in the US, Canada and Europe, as well as the most common and widespread species in India and throughout Central and South America.

“It’s always a work in progress to collect more species. There are a few we’d like to add but we’re always adding more and improving species performance,” said Barry.

The app has been downloaded more than 40m times in 240 countries, up from 33m downloads since December last year. Britain has the second highest number of users, nearly 2 million on the app in May this year. Canada, Germany, France, Spain and the Netherlands are in the top 10 countries with the highest numbers using the app.

The Merlin app is identified by others as an opportunity to connect more people with nature and help promote conservation work. But there are some concerns that the app could misidentify birds, and the European Bird Census Council recommends against using Merlin for official surveys of breeding birds. The EBCC has established a monitoring group to co-ordinate, direct and coordinate the monitoring of noisy birds across Europe.

Moira Forsyth, a Merlin user who lives in Muir of Ord in Scotland, said she used the app along with other forms of identification. “We were surprised to find that we have a lot more birds here than we thought,” she said. “Armed with the app, the RSPB’s book on Scottish birds, my trusty old copy of Collins Complete British Wildlife and the binoculars we keep on the kitchen window, we’re getting better at this.”

Professor Richard Gregory, of the RSPB, said: “It’s great that it’s growing in popularity and use, and especially among a new, wider and different group of people. Everywhere I go, I see people using the Merlin, connecting with nature and learning about their birds, becoming curious to know more. Fantastic – a revolution.”

Gregory cautioned, however, that the app still made identification errors and misidentified his dachshund as a bird. “If you’re not an expert, you wouldn’t know there was a mistake,” he said. “It’s great to hear that Cornell is making changes that mean recordings from Merlin will go to eBird easily, so it’s great if the species recognition is correct. [but] it is a conservation problem if not.”

Barry said that research groups that often use these types of data sources will face challenges with data quality. “Our ability to understand changes in bird diversity will be better served by more data to work with than by not collecting it at all.”