Sonoma County Bird Soundscapes with Land Use Stratification

1399 sites in Sonoma County, California, were sampled with automated recorders from 2017 to 2022 during bird breeding seasons. The NASA-supported Soundscapes to Landscapes citizen science project collected one-minute audio recordings every ten minutes, providing day and night temporal coverage across stratified land use types like forest, shrubland, and urban areas. Associated site data includes location information and photographs where permitted.

Use Cases

• Analyzing bird species presence and vocal activity across different land cover types (forest, shrubland, urban).
• Investigating diurnal and nocturnal soundscape patterns using temporally sampled 1-minute recordings.
• Modeling habitat suitability by correlating acoustic detections with site topographic position and land use.
• Training machine learning models for bird call detection using high-quality .wav files at 44.1 kHz or 48 kHz.
• Studying the impact of human-altered landscapes (agriculture, riparian areas) on avian community composition.

Strengths

• Spatial stratification across 1399 sites ensures representation of diverse land use and topographic conditions.
• Temporal sampling over five breeding seasons (2017-2022) captures inter-annual variation in bird activity.
• Standardized recording protocol provides consistent 1-minute samples every 10 minutes, enabling analysis of daily cycles.
• Use of two calibrated recorder types (Android smartphones and AudioMoths) with specified bit depth and sampling rates ensures audio fidelity.

Limitations

• Site location data is incomplete, as coordinates were only included when permitted by landowners.
• Conflicting last updated dates exist between platforms (2026-03 12 on Data.gov vs. 2022-07-11 on NASA Earthdata).
• The exact number of audio files, total dataset size, and specific column names for tabular data are not provided.

Provenance

Source

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)

Collection Method

In-situ sound recordings collected via automated Android smartphones and AudioMoth recorders deployed for at least 3 days per site.

Time Range

2017 to 2022

Freshness

2026-03-12 22:22:01.553963

Geography

Sonoma County, California, USA