Tracking coral reef degradation and recovery using soundscapes
OPL team members involved
Ben Williams & David Curnick
Collaborators
University College London, University of Bristol & Mars Global
Location
Global
Year
2021-2025
Project description
On thriving coral reefs fish, snapping shrimp and other organisms come together to produce a rich and diverse soundscape. However, on degraded reefs much of this acoustic complexity is lost. Recent advancements in technology have made passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) a cost-effective and low-effort means to gather data from coral reefs, allowing the field of soundscape ecology on these habitats to begin establishing itself. However, due to its very recent emergence we lack the automated tooling needed to analyse the vast datasets we can now gather, meaning many important questions in this space remain unanswered.
Ben Williams PhD has focused on overcoming these tooling shortfalls and advancing our understanding of how PAM can help us understand and protect coral reefs. His work has focused on four key areas:
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Testing the efficacy of supervised and unsupervised machine learning techniques at revealing meaningful ecological insights from 'whole soundscape' data.
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Developing and deploying an acoustic based classifier and monitoring programme for illegal bomb fishing to provide a first of its kind quantification of this practice at a known hotspot in the Indo-pacific.
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Developing SurfPerch, a pretrained neural network designed to rapidly learn new reef sounds from minimal examples using 'few-shot transfer learning'. This has helped advance our analysis at scale, moving beyond whole soundscapes to studying individual bioacoustic signals within the data.
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Leveraging SurfPerch and advanced 'agile modelling' to rapidly build dozens of classifiers for reef sounds from restoration projects across the globe to investigate their functional recovery through the soundscape.
You can learn more about the outputs from Ben's PhD in his TEDx London talk:
https://youtu.be/GnB8OoT2UAE?si=VBQoHZcUI_J-4_H5
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Fish sounds are an important contributor to coral reef soundscapes, their abundance and diversity can teach us about the state of a reef. Have a listen to some of these:
Ben deploys a hydrophone on a tropical reef where restoration began three years previously in South Sulawesi, Indonesia (Image courtesy of Tim Lamont).