Diversity Monitoring of Coexisting Birds in Urban Forests by Integrating Spectrograms and Object-Based Image Analysis

In the context of rapid urbanization, urban foresters are actively seeking management monitoring programs that address the challenges of urban biodiversity loss. Passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) has attracted attention because it allows for the collection of data passively, objectively, and continuously across large areas and for extended periods. However, it continues to be a difficult subject due to the massive amount of information that audio recordings contain. Most existing automated analysis methods have limitations in their application in urban areas, with unclear ecological relevance and efficacy. To better support urban forest biodiversity monitoring, we present a novel methodology for automatically extracting bird vocalizations from spectrograms of field audio recordings, integrating object-based classification. We applied this approach to acoustic data from an urban forest in Beijing and achieved an accuracy of 93.55% (±4.78%) in vocalization recognition while requiring less than ⅛ of the time needed for traditional inspection. The difference in efficiency would become more significant as the data size increases because object-based classification allows for batch processing of spectrograms. Using the extracted vocalizations, a series of acoustic and morphological features of bird-vocalization syllables (syllable feature metrics, SFMs) could be calculated to better quantify acoustic events and describe the soundscape. A significant correlation between the SFMs and biodiversity indices was found, with 57% of the variance in species richness, 41% in Shannon’s diversity index and 38% in Simpson’s diversity index being explained by SFMs. Therefore, our proposed method provides an effective complementary tool to existing automated methods for long-term urban forest biodiversity monitoring and conservation.