Join us on February 12 to hear from Dr. Matthew Clark, SSU Professor and Principal Investigator for Point Blue Conservation Science’s exciting NASA-funded "Soundscapes to Landscapes" project. Matt will be joined by colleague, David Leland.

Soundscapes to Landscapes (S2L) is a NASA-funded project led by Dr. Matthew Clark of the Center for Interdisciplinary Geospatial Analysis (CIGA), in Geography, Environment and Planning at Sonoma State University. Project collaborators are affiliated with Point Blue Conservation Science, Northern Arizona University, UC Merced, Audubon California, Pepperwood Preserve, and the Sonoma County Agriculture Preservation and Open Space District. The broad goal of the project is to advance animal diversity monitoring from the next generation of Earth-observing satellites. The project uses sounds recorded from low-cost recorders placed in the field (i.e., soundscapes) and bioacoustics analysis to identify bird species by their calls and measure overall avian diversity. Bird diversity data are used by the science team to explore the benefits and trade-offs in using new and existing sensors in space for mapping of bird diversity and conservation planning. One new sensor the team is using is NASA’s Global Ecosystem Dynamics Investigation (GEDI), docked on the International Space Station, which uses a laser to provide detailed measurements of vegetation canopy height and internal structure that can be related to bird habitat. The S2L project is currently focused in Sonoma County, an area with a diverse range of natural vegetation, urban and agricultural landscapes, including areas recovering from the October 2017 fires.

A critical component of S2L is a partnership with “citizen scientists”, or volunteers in the community, that help with placement of recorders on public and private lands, assist with data management, identify bird calls in sound recordings, and train machine learning models. Since starting in spring 2017, fifty citizen scientists have donated approximately 3,800 hours of time. Working with landowners, public agencies, and land conservation organizations, citizen scientists have placed recorders at over 593 sites around the county. The science team has just begun to tap the information stored in these audio data. A team at Northern Arizona University is exploring how forest complexity, as measured remotely by GEDI, is related to bird diversity and aggregate measures of soundscape diversity. The project is partnering with Sieve Analytics, the company that makes a web-based bioacoustics analysis platform (Arbimon), to create a citizen science interface for rapid bird-call validation. In addition, collaborators at UC Merced are exploring cutting-edge “deep learning” (e.g., artificial intelligence) methods for improving automated bird-call detections in recordings. Soundscapes to Landscapes is funded for three years, but the project seeks to build a citizen science and data processing system that can scale to larger regions with private funding.

Learn more about S2L here: https://soundscapes2landscapes.org/

Bio Dr. Matthew Clark is a professor in the Geography, Environment, and Planning department at Sonoma State University. He has a PhD in Geography from University of California, Santa Barbara and a MSc in Conservation and Ecosystem Analysis from University of Washington. He teaches classes in geographic information systems (GIS) and remote sensing. His research is focused on using novel forms of remote sensing, including satellites, airplane sensors and drones, for monitoring biodiversity, assessing land change, and helping conservation and land management.