Ecology & computer audition: Applications of audio technology to monitor organisms and environment

Among the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) proposed within the 2030 Agenda and adopted by all the United Nations member states, the 13th SDG is a call for action to combat climate change. Moreover, SDGs 14 and 15 claim the protection and conservation of life below water and life on land, respectively. In this work, we provide a literature-founded overview of application areas, in which computer audition – a powerful but in this context so far hardly considered technology, combining audio signal processing and machine intelligence – is employed to monitor our ecosystem with the potential to identify ecologically critical processes or states. We distinguish between applications related to organisms, such as species richness analysis and plant health monitoring, and applications related to the environment, such as melting ice monitoring or wildfire detection. This work positions computer audition in relation to alternative approaches by discussing methodological strengths and limitations, as well as ethical aspects. We conclude with an urgent call to action to the research community for a greater involvement of audio intelligence methodology in future ecosystem monitoring approaches.