World’s biggest archive of animal sounds

This video from the USA says about itself:

Decades of bird signals, songs digitized for scientific research – Science Nation

21 August 2017

Tease: Cornell Lab of Ornithology leads 21st century makeover for animal behavior studies

Description: The world’s largest scientific archive of animal signal recordings, the Macaulay Library of Natural Sounds, is partnering with other institutions to co-curate and digitize an enormous archive of animal audio and video recordings from the library’s vaults.

The analog material in the library’s collection at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology includes recordings of mainly birds, but also frogs, fish and insects, going back a few decades. The collections are a bonanza for animal behaviorists, who use the archives to study birds and other animals from all over the world, including some that are now extinct, such as the imperial woodpecker.

Accessible digital audio recordings of animal signals will make it easier for researchers to investigate a host of scientific questions, including what can scientists learn about the responses of animals to anthropogenic noise and other human activities.

By providing a useful co-curation system and encouraging collection of recordings along with physical specimens, this project is expected to transform the way researchers collect and use biological specimens in the future.

The research in this episode is supported by NSF award #1304425, Collaborative Research: Digitization – Thematic Collections Networks: Developing a Centralized Digital Archive of Vouchered Animal Communication Signals.