AviaNZ: a future-proofed program for annotation and recognition of animal sounds in long-time field recordings

The routine collection of long‐time acoustic recordings of animals in the field presents new challenges in data analysis. While many terabytes of data are collected annually, effective use of this noisy, highly variable data require skilled humans to manually identify calls. While computer programs to automatically analyse these recordings are becoming available, it is important that they are user‐friendly and easy‐to‐use, so that everybody – citizen scientists, wildlife managers, researchers – can take advantage of them, and that they keep the human in the loop so analyses carried out this year are comparable both to manual call counts from the past, and more accurate automated analyses performed in the future.
We present the AviaNZ program, which is designed to achieve these goals: the software includes methods for simple, rapid manual annotation of recordings, denoising and segmentation methods, and a training procedure by which the user can prepare their own filters to automaticall...