xeno-canto is a citizen science project and repository in which volunteers record, upload and annotate recordings of bird calls and sounds of orthoptera and bats.[2] Since it began in 2005, it has collected over 575,000 sound recordings from more than 10,000 species worldwide, and has become one of the biggest collections of bird sounds in the world.[1] All the recordings are published under one of the Creative Commons licenses,[3] including some with open licences. Each recording on the website is accompanied by a spectrogram and location data on a map displaying geographical variation.
Data from xeno-canto has been re-used in many (a few thousand) scientific papers.[4][5][6][7] It has also been the source of data for an annual challenge on automatic birdsong recognition ("BirdCLEF") since 2014, conducted as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.[8]
The website is supported by a number of academic and birdwatching institutions worldwide, with its primary support being in the Netherlands.[9]
^Brumm, H. & Naguib, M. (2009), "Environmental acoustics and the evolution of bird song", Advances in the Study of Behavior, 40: 1–33, doi:10.1016/S0065-3454(09)40001-9
^Weir, J.T. & Wheatcroft, D. (2011), "A latitudinal gradient in rates of evolution of avian syllable diversity and song length", Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278 (1712): 1713–1720, doi:10.1098/rspb.2010.2037, PMC3081773, PMID21068034