Researchers who depend on bioacoustics for environmental monitoring are falling prey to a common issue: too much data, not enough time to sort it, and therefore no ability to use it effectively. AcoustiCloud is a system framework developed by three researchers at the University of Tasmania’s School of Technology, Environments, and Design in 2020. Raw data is fed into AcoustiCloud via the Cloud and from there, AcoustiCloud executes a workflow, or a string of related and repetitive tasks to convert the data into a usable format, saving hours of time that would have been spent manually inputting data. The benefit of this system is that a researcher can use and share the data much more quickly and efficiently. AcoustiCloud is still a prototype but was found to execute a workflow— which can presumably be adjusted to the needs of the user— 10 times faster than the current software commonly used in bioacoustics called Pegasus. It would be interesting to see this software combined with an algorithm or accompanying software that could replace the manual work of analyzing audio to save time since that is also a time and resource-intensive aspect of data analysis for bioacoustics researchers. If the goal of this software is to help researchers more efficiently allocate their time, this would be a useful additional function.
Brown, Alexander, Saurabh Garg, and James Montgomery. “AcoustiCloud: A cloud-based system for managing large-scale bioacoustics processing.” Environmental Modelling & Software (2020): 104778. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S136481521931120X
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