##  [Audio Data Compression Affects Acoustic Indices and Reduces Detections of Birds by Human Listening and Automated Recognisers](/resource/audio-data-compression-affects-acoustic-indices-and-reduces-detections-birds-human) 

Organization

[Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute (ABMI)](/organization/alberta-biodiversity-monitoring-institute-abmi)

[University of Alberta (UofA)](/organization/university-alberta-uofa)

[Environment and Climate Change Canada (ECCC)](/organization/environment-and-climate-change-canada-eccc)

 

 

Resource Type

[Peer reviewed article](/taxonomy/term/37)

 

 

Author(s)

Alexander MacPhail

Daniel Yip

Elly Knight

Richard Hedley

Michelle Knaggs

Julia Shonfield

Emily Upham-Mills

Erin Bayne

 

 

Original Authors

Alexander MacPhail

Daniel Yip

Elly Knight

Richard Hedley

Michelle Knaggs

Julia Shonfield

Emily Upham-Mills

Erin Bayne

 

 

Resource Date:

2023

 

 

Increasing popularity in passive acoustic monitoring and the ease with which researchers can accumulate large quantities of acoustic data has resulted in challenges for audio recording storage, archiving, and management. Reductions in file size can be achieved by lowering sample rate and compressing to different formats; however, how these processes affect audio data quality, and the resulting interpretation of wildlife data is not well understood. We investigated the effect of sampling rate and lossy compression of audio recordings to MP3 from their native WAV format on the performance of four commonly applied avian bioacoustic applications: community listening, distance estimation, automated recognition, and acoustic indices. Compression to MP3 decreased the number of detections, including a reduction in total abundance of individuals when transcribing audio files for community listening and lower precision and recall for automated recognisers. Sampling rate reduction introduced systematic bias to acoustic indices and had an influence on precision and recall for recognisers as well. We recommend against the use of MP3 compression to reduce file volume and suggest other lossless forms of audio compression where an exact copy of the original recording can be recovered.