Full catalog/Acoustic_Data_SonomaCounty_CA_2341
Acoustic_Data_SonomaCounty_CA_2341·v1·dataset

Wildlife sound recordings in Sonoma County, California

Soundscapes to Landscapes Acoustic Recordings, Sonoma County, CA, 2017-2022
biosphere NASA ORNL_CLOUD Level 0 multiple
In plain English

What it measures. A library of actual sound recordings captured outdoors at nearly 1,400 sites across Sonoma County, California, during the bird breeding season. Each site recorded one minute out of every ten, day and night, so you hear birds and other sounds throughout the daily cycle.

How it's made. Citizen-science volunteers placed two kinds of automatic recorders in the field, smartphones with microphones and small AudioMoth devices, and the raw .wav audio files were collected along with site details and photos.

How & where you'd use it. Researchers and birders can use the recordings to study which species are present, how wildlife responds to different landscapes like forest, farmland, or city, and to train computer programs that recognize bird calls.

What's measured

BIOSPHERE › ECOLOGICAL DYNAMICS › COMMUNITY DYNAMICSBIOLOGICAL CLASSIFICATION › ANIMALS/VERTEBRATES › BIRDS

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span2017-04-01 → 2022-07-11
  • Measured byData Collections (Passive Acoustic Recorder)
  • Processing levelLevel 0
  • Spatial extent-123.528, 38.1419, -122.465, 38.8499
  • Formatsmultiple
  • StatusCOMPLETE

What you can do with it

  • Map vegetation, forests and biomass
  • Monitor ecosystem productivity and carbon
  • Support habitat and biodiversity studies
Official description

This dataset holds in situ sound recordings from sites in Sonoma County, California, USA as part of the Soundscapes to Landscapes citizen science project. Recordings were collected from 2017 to 2022 during the bird breeding season (mid-March thru mid-July). Sites (n=1399) were selected across the county; locations were stratified with respect to topographic position and broad land use/land cover types, such as forest, shrubland, herbaceous, urban, agriculture, and riparian areas. Two types of automated recorders were used: Android-based smartphones with attached microphones and AudioMoths. Recorders were deployed at sites for at least 3 days, and programmed to record 1 min of every 10, thus providing temporal sampling through day and night. Each recording was saved in a waveform audio file format (.wav) with 16-bit digitization depth and 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz sampling rate for smartphone and AudioMoth recorders, respectively. The dataset also includes site information including site location when so permitted by landowners in tabular form and photographs of field sites.

Get the data

acoustic_data_sonomacounty_ca_2341_access.py
import earthaccess
earthaccess.login(strategy="netrc")          # free Earthdata Login

results = earthaccess.search_data(
    short_name="Acoustic_Data_SonomaCounty_CA_2341",
    version="1",
    bounding_box=(-122.5, 37.2, -121.8, 37.9),  # your area (W,S,E,N)
    temporal=("2024-01-01", "2024-12-31"),       # your dates
)
files = earthaccess.open(results)   # stream straight from ORNL_CLOUD
Browsing CMR needs no login. Downloading or streaming bytes needs a free Earthdata Login + the earthaccess package.