Ndege Zetu: A dataset to compare bird species monitoring approaches in the Mt Kenya ecosystem

Biodiversity loss is a pressing challenge with ecosystems across the world under threat from factors such as human encroachment, over exploitation and climate change. It is important to increase ecosystem monitoring efforts to provide actionable insights for ecosystem managers and to allow effective use of conservation resources. This dataset is used to compare traditional bird survey approaches using point counts to  the use of autonomous recording units and citizen scientists data at two sites within the Mt Kenya ecosystem. We also present a new dataset of over 20 hours of recordings obtained from the Mt Kenya ecosystem and annotated by expert ornithologists. These audio recordings are used to demonstrate the use of large deep learning models to recognise species in the Mt Kenya ecosystem.