An innovative project which uses birdsong could make an affordable solution for measuring and managing biodiversity.
The ‘ChirrupNano’ project is a collaboration between the UK Agri-Tech Centre and Chirrup.ai. with funding from Innovate UK, it uses birdsong to monitor wildlife previously unseen in nature reserves and back garden bird counts.
Using a slimline bio-recorder it can be remotely deployed wherever it’s needed. Chirrup’s AI already recognises over 100 species from Great Britain and Ireland.
With support from the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB), the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO), The Wildlife Trusts and the Game & Wildlife Conservation Trust (GWCT) it is already getting major retraining to recognise all the important UK species. The redesigned website app lets farms compare their species lists to others, to standard benchmarks and even their own past performance.
This empowers them to make more informed decisions about sustainable practices, leading to a richer, healthier ecosystem – such as increased plant diversity, better soil and fewer pests.
Birds are ecological barometers; they’re everywhere, super responsive to change and their presence tells a story about the thriving life in the places they occupy – from insects and plants to clean water and the general quality of the ecosystem.
With farmland covering a huge 71% of the UK, it is the ideal testing ground for the next-generation Chirrup.ai and farmers are being asked to respond to changing government and food company policies on pro-wildlife production.
Hayley Gerry, Project Manager at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, said: “The expanse of knowledge we can gain about biodiversity in an area using the bioacoustics of bird song is extremely impressive.
“To enable sustainable farming, we need to encourage multi-species habitats to enrich the areas, which in turn makes the farming of livestock and arable products sustainable.
“In order to do this, we need to be able to measure the baseline of the current situation, and that is where this project comes in.”
Next steps
The project will be put to the test in the spring of 2025 across the UK. Expert ornithologists and ecologists will analyse and validate the results whilst the UK Agri-Tech Centre will help link outcomes to agricultural practices.
To share the findings. Chirrup.ai will host two events at the end of the project.
