2017 Volume 13 Pages A15-A28
We have engaged in acoustic monitoring inside and outside of the evacuation zone suffered the impact of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant accident since 2014. Not only to promote communication between researchers and local community but also to improve transparency of the research processes, we held an event, “Bird Data Challenge in Fukushima”, in 2015. In the event, we listened to the audio data and made the identified species list of birds with participants using a newly-developed web-based interface for acoustic identification, “SONO-TORI”, and a semi-real-time visualization system, “SONO-TORI VIS”. In the event, 30 participants were divided into five small groups, and listened to the audio data of 63 minutes and succeeded to identify 23 bird species in total. The results of questionnaires on the participants showed that the level of satisfaction and willingness to revisit was substantially high. We also found that mutual communication between participants and improvement of identification skill had significant effects on the level of satisfaction. Although there are several things to be improved in the way to share the result with participants and to assign the appropriate tasks, our attempt showed a potential of identification of birds from recorded birdsongs as an event format of citizen-participating survey.
