Posts
This is UNREAL stuff - this is an incredible example of what miraculous things can get built if people all over the world collaborate over decades , leveraging technology ...
This is a FREE , open to people, built by people and moderated by people, superbly organized database of calls and bird sounds of 10,000 + species of birds from ALL OVER THE WORLD
Please do check the website out - you could be sitting in Mumbai - and at a click of a button you can listen to validated call recording of a new species of 'Tinamau' from Brazilian rainforest https://xeno-canto.org/forum/topic/71048
or
that of a 'Chuck-will's Widow' from Oklohoma https://xeno-canto.org/797414
This project recently completed 20 years - do read the note by the key people behind it
20 years of XC!
By Willem-Pier Vellinga and Bob Planqué
May 30, 2025
Xeno-canto turned 20 years old the other day, on may 30th ..!
What an adventure. Starting from Neotropical birds, XC now covers birds worldwide, and also grasshoppers and crickets, bats, land mammals and frogs.
Together with all recordists, 11000+ of us now, we've collected close to a million recordings in those 20 years. Wow. One amazing statistic that has held throughout these years is that on average each new recordist has contributed about 100 recordings. So, keep spreading the word!
At the same time there is a large imbalance between the number of recordings shared, with around 10 recordists sharing more than 10000 recordings each. Perhaps it is more interesting that there is a large imbalance in the number of recordings per species. So there is still a lot to record and discover out there.
A short history of XC
Back in 2003, Bob and Willem-Pier had both visited South America several times, doing bird surveys and making sound recordings in the tropics of Ecuador and Peru. They were both grappling with the diversity of birds in these forests. Bob had created a simple program with which a list of qualitative sound characteristics for a set of species could be turned into a decision tree. He put out the word on NEOORN, a web forum on Neotropical Ornithology. He got one reply: from Willem-Pier. The two had both been thinking of ways to make sound recordings easier to navigate. It turned out that WP was working at the TU Eindhoven; Bob was finishing his PhD and had to travel to Eindhoven every few weeks to meet his advisor. The two met there for an hour or so, at which point the idea for a website to share recordings was born.
They then went their separate ways; Bob to the UK to do a postdoc, Willem-Pier moved back to Groningen. Over the next year or so, Bob conjured up a first draft website. Before launching, Willem-Pier and Bob asked Doug Stotz to allow them to use the inimitable Neotropical Birds database as backbone. This is a one of a kind database with details on habitat use, biogeographical and country information for all the bird species in Central and South America. Way ahead of the curve: to this day, no similar database exists for other taxa or other regions. Together with the innovation of a qualitative scoring system of sound characters for bird sounds, the site went live. Sonograms followed soon after. Read all about it in the news of 2005. Practically all development of XC was discussed via email or chat. Willem-Pier and Bob wouldn't meet again in person until about two years later.
XC principles
Although XC has always been about sharing and open source, its principles were first properly written down when preparing for a talk in 2009 at the Brazilian Bird Fair Avistar. So thanks to Guto Carvalho for inviting us over!
Automatic recognition and software tools
XC has been a driver of research on automatic recognition of bird sounds, with over a decade of involvement in BirdCLEF. Most major algorithms (especially BirdNET, Perch, and their off-shoots) have been trained on XC data. For European grasshoppers, we can now also start making inroads. XC has also inspired several software projects, notably warbleR designed to analyse XC recordings.
Unexpected use of XC recordings
XC recordings are used in the weirdest and coolest ways. How about Holger Ballweg's BeakFM, an XC radio, streaming sounds of birds that have been recorded near the current location of the International Space Station? There are also several crowd-funded music albums by Shika Shika in which XC recordings have been prime source material. Their fourth album A Guide to the Birdsong of Migration by Shika Shika is still in the making, and you can support the initiative to make it a reality.
Since it is our birthday, we figure you might wonder if we'd like presents. We do :-) What about finally getting that set on the hard disks in your drawers ready for upload? Or if you do not have those:
Start supporting XC for our 20th birthday!
In these 20 years XC has had huge impact and we would like it to remain as important as it is now.
Among other things that means maintaining and developing the code and IT hardware and initiate, plan and execute XC projects. In those projects XC invests time and effort to make wildlife sounds accessible to everyone. From citizen scientists to conservationists to curious listeners. XC is about improving tools for sharing, exploring, and analyzing sounds, not about chasing clicks or mining user data.
XC has operated on a shoestring budget over the years. You can check our financial records for that.
Of course XC does this together with other organisations, most importantly Naturalis (cooperation and IT support since 2008!!) and GBIF/NLBIF (a number of crucial grants for development). But, at the moment still, most of the work going into maintaining and developing XC is carried out & coordinated by a core group of volunteers that have to liberate time to put in the necessary effort.
XC is not funded by advertising, commercial interests, or corporate mandates. Our priorities are set by the curiosity and fascination with sounds of a global community of recordists, listeners, and researchers. Openness is at the core of XC: anyone, anywhere in the world can contribute to or benefit from this unique archive.
If you belong to that crowd and value the sounds we share here, and value the way we do that, please consider supporting Xeno-canto today with a donation.
- Community support means the team behind XC can keep affording to liberate time to get work done for XC.
- Community support means XC can stay independent, free and open.
- Community support means XC can keep focussing on what matters.
This article was last updated on May 31, 2025 at 07:32
No comments:
Post a Comment