From BirdNET output to an occupancy model

A classifier such as BirdNET (Kahl et al., 2021) lists detections: for each audio file, the time windows where it found a species, with a confidence score. An occupancy model needs something else: one row per sampling occasion, including the occasions where nothing was found, and a separate record of which detections a person checked. This article goes from the first to the second with fp_read_birdnet(), fp_read_validation(), and fp_aggregate(), and fits the model to the result.

The example data are made up so that the article runs anywhere, but they have the layout of real files: BirdNET selection tables in the Raven format, and the clip-by-clip verdicts written by the ‘sheepdog’ package (https://provetelab.org/sheepdog/), which cuts clips from BirdNET detections for review and is installed from the same R-universe as crywolf (https://diogoprov.r-universe.dev).

Two kinds of checking

Two designs use checked data, and they need different files.

In the observation-confirmation design (Chambert et al., 2015), a person listens to clips that the classifier flagged and says whether each holds the species. The verdicts refer to detections, so they enter as counts of confirmed true and false detections per occasion. This is what fp_read_validation() and the validation argument of fp_aggregate() produce.
In the multiple-methods design (Miller et al., 2011), a person annotates whole recordings, whether or not the classifier flagged them. These are a second detection method, entered as the verified table of fp_data(). In ‘sheepdog’, clips of whole recordings (sampling_mode = "random_recordings") are of this kind and must not be passed to fp_aggregate().

Either way, the clips must be chosen without regard to the classifier’s score. Clips picked because they have the highest scores contain fewer false positives than the average detection and make the false-positive rate look lower than it is. In ‘sheepdog’, draw them at random among the detections (sampling_mode = "random_detections").

Example files

We start from a simulated dataset with known structure: 60 sites, each recorded on 8 nights, with observation confirmation on about 40% of the occasions.

library(crywolf)
sim <- simulate_fp(nsite = 60, nocc = 8, frac_confirmed = 0.4,
                   frac_verified = 0, seed = 1)
truth <- sim$data$auto
truth$file <- sprintf("S%02d_202401%02d_200000.wav", truth$site, truth$occasion)
head(truth[, c("site", "occasion", "file", "y", "n_true", "n_false")])
#>   site occasion                    file y n_true n_false
#> 1    1        1 S01_20240101_200000.wav 0     NA      NA
#> 2    2        1 S02_20240101_200000.wav 0      0       0
#> 3    3        1 S03_20240101_200000.wav 0     NA      NA
#> 4    4        1 S04_20240101_200000.wav 1     NA      NA
#> 5    5        1 S05_20240101_200000.wav 0     NA      NA
#> 6    6        1 S06_20240101_200000.wav 0     NA      NA

From it we write what the field data would look like. Each occasion with a detection gets a BirdNET row with a high confidence, and some occasions without one get a row below the threshold of 0.5 that we will use. One selection table per site goes into a folder.

set.seed(2)
dir_tables <- file.path(tempdir(), "birdnet")
dir.create(dir_tables, showWarnings = FALSE)
low <- truth$y == 0 & stats::runif(nrow(truth)) < 0.2
det <- truth[truth$y == 1 | low, ]
det$confidence <- ifelse(det$y == 1, stats::runif(nrow(det), 0.5, 1),
                         stats::runif(nrow(det), 0.1, 0.5))
det$start <- 3 * sample(0:199, nrow(det), replace = TRUE)
purrr::walk(split(det, det$site), function(d) {
  tab <- data.frame(
    Selection = seq_len(nrow(d)), View = "Spectrogram 1", Channel = 1,
    `Begin Time (s)` = d$start, `End Time (s)` = d$start + 3,
    `Begin Path` = file.path("/audio", d$file), `File Offset (s)` = d$start,
    `Species Code` = "compau", `Common Name` = "Common Pauraque",
    Confidence = round(d$confidence, 4), check.names = FALSE)
  utils::write.table(tab, file.path(dir_tables, sprintf("S%02d.BirdNET.selection.table.txt",
                                                       d$site[1])),
                     sep = "\t", row.names = FALSE, quote = FALSE)
})
list.files(dir_tables)[1:3]
#> [1] "S01.BirdNET.selection.table.txt" "S02.BirdNET.selection.table.txt"
#> [3] "S03.BirdNET.selection.table.txt"

The verdicts follow the layout of validation_by_clip.csv: one row per reviewed clip. A confirmed occasion contributes one positive clip if the species was there and one negative clip if the classifier also fired on something else.

conf <- truth[!is.na(truth$n_true) & truth$y == 1, ]
clips <- rbind(
  data.frame(conf[conf$n_true > 0, c("site", "file")], verdict = "positive"),
  data.frame(conf[conf$n_false > 0, c("site", "file")], verdict = "negative"))
clips <- merge(clips, det[, c("file", "start", "confidence")], by = "file")
validation <- data.frame(
  site = sprintf("S%02d", clips$site), species_code = "compau",
  source_audio = file.path("/audio", clips$file), clip_start = clips$start,
  clip_end = clips$start + 3, confidence = clips$confidence,
  sampling_mode = "random_detections", occasion_id = sub("\\.wav$", "", clips$file),
  verdict = clips$verdict)
f_validation <- file.path(tempdir(), "validation_by_clip.csv")
utils::write.csv(validation, f_validation, row.names = FALSE)
table(validation$verdict)
#> 
#> negative positive 
#>       12       56

Reading the files

fp_read_birdnet() reads every selection table in the folder, standardizes the column names (Begin Time (s) becomes begin_time), and adds the name of the audio file and, when the file name carries a YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS stamp, the time of each detection.

detections <- fp_read_birdnet(dir_tables)
head(detections[, c("file", "start", "species_code", "confidence", "time")])
#>                      file start species_code confidence                time
#> 1 S01_20240101_200000.wav   561       compau     0.3142 2024-01-01 20:09:21
#> 2 S01_20240103_200000.wav   330       compau     0.1231 2024-01-03 20:05:30
#> 3 S01_20240107_200000.wav   519       compau     0.1950 2024-01-07 20:08:39
#> 4 S02_20240104_200000.wav   189       compau     0.5073 2024-01-04 20:03:09
#> 5 S02_20240108_200000.wav   522       compau     0.3466 2024-01-08 20:08:42
#> 6 S03_20240103_200000.wav   237       compau     0.8389 2024-01-03 20:03:57

fp_read_validation() reads the verdicts, in the format of ‘sheepdog’ 2.0.0 or in the Portuguese format of the sampler up to version 1.2.0 (validacao_por_clipe.csv), and returns TRUE for a positive clip, FALSE for a negative one, and NA for a clip not reviewed.

verdicts <- fp_read_validation(f_validation)
head(verdicts)
#>   site species_code                    file start end confidence verdict
#> 1  S02       compau S02_20240104_200000.wav   189 192  0.5073348   FALSE
#> 2  S03       compau S03_20240103_200000.wav   237 240  0.8389030    TRUE
#> 3  S03       compau S03_20240103_200000.wav   237 240  0.8389030   FALSE
#> 4  S03       compau S03_20240107_200000.wav   246 249  0.9667769    TRUE
#> 5  S05       compau S05_20240102_200000.wav   144 147  0.8415215    TRUE
#> 6  S05       compau S05_20240104_200000.wav   162 165  0.7387293    TRUE
#>           occasion_id
#> 1 S02_20240104_200000
#> 2 S03_20240103_200000
#> 3 S03_20240103_200000
#> 4 S03_20240107_200000
#> 5 S05_20240102_200000
#> 6 S05_20240104_200000

When ‘sheepdog’ wrote the whole survey with export_occupancy_data(), fp_read_sheepdog() reads that folder instead: every occasion, the predictions, the reviewed clips with their sampling design, and the recordings annotated by ear, already in the forms used below. It drops clips drawn with sampling_mode = "top", which were chosen for their high scores, and refuses schemas it does not know.

x <- fp_read_sheepdog("occupancy_export", species = "compau")
auto <- fp_aggregate(x$occasions, x$detections, threshold = 0.5,
                     by = c("site", "occasion_id"), validation = x$validation)

Building the occasions

The classifier lists detections only, so the occasions come from a table of all recordings: here, one per site and night, with the site covariate.

occasions <- data.frame(site = truth$site, file = truth$file)
sites <- sim$data$sites

fp_aggregate() marks an occasion as a detection when it has a detection at or above the threshold, and turns the verdicts into the counts n_true and n_false of the occasions that were checked. Verdicts on clips below the threshold are dropped, since those clips are not detections at this threshold.

auto <- fp_aggregate(occasions, detections, threshold = 0.5,
                     validation = verdicts)
head(auto)
#>   site                    file n_detections y  score n_true n_false
#> 1    1 S01_20240101_200000.wav            0 0 0.3142     NA      NA
#> 2    2 S02_20240101_200000.wav            0 0 0.0000     NA      NA
#> 3    3 S03_20240101_200000.wav            0 0 0.0000     NA      NA
#> 4    4 S04_20240101_200000.wav            1 1 0.8801     NA      NA
#> 5    5 S05_20240101_200000.wav            0 0 0.0000     NA      NA
#> 6    6 S06_20240101_200000.wav            0 0 0.0000     NA      NA
c(detections = sum(auto$y), checked = sum(!is.na(auto$n_true)))
#> detections    checked 
#>        160         60
all(auto$y == truth$y)
#> [1] TRUE

The occasions are the same as in the simulated truth. fp_aggregate() warns when an occasion has more detections at or above the threshold than reviewed clips, because the confirmation design assumes that every detection of a checked occasion was checked.

Fitting the model

The result goes to fp_data() as the automated table, with the names of the confirmation counts.

d <- fp_data(auto, sites, confirmed = c("n_true", "n_false"))
d
#> <fp_data>
#>   sites:                  60
#>   automated occasions:    480 (naive occupancy 0.65)
#>   verified sites:         0 (0 occasions; verified detections at 0 sites)
#>   confirmed occasions:    60 (56 with a true observation, at 24 sites)
#>   sites known occupied:   24
#>   site covariates:        x, w 
#>   observation covariates: file, n_detections, score

m <- fp_occu(d, occ = ~ x, fp = ~ 1, random_recorder = FALSE,
             threads_per_chain = 1, seed = 1,
             refresh = 0, show_messages = FALSE)
summary(m)

The simulation used an occupancy slope of -0.8 and a false-positive rate of 0.05; both lie inside the 95% intervals. The rest of the analysis, from convergence checks to predictions, is the same as in vignette("crywolf").

With real files

Real data differ from this example in a few ways that matter.

The occasion table must list every recording, including those where BirdNET found nothing, with the site and any covariates. A list of the audio files on disk is a good start.
An occasion can be shorter than a file. With one-minute occasions, add a column for the minute to both tables and pass by = c("file", "minute").
BirdNET tables hold every species; give species to fp_aggregate() to keep one.
The threshold changes which occasions are detections, and with them the estimates. vignette("threshold") shows how to check that.

References

Chambert, T., Miller, D. A. W., & Nichols, J. D. (2015). Modeling false positive detections in species occurrence data under different study designs. Ecology, 96, 332–339. https://doi.org/10.1890/14-1507.1

Kahl, S., Wood, C. M., Eibl, M., & Klinck, H. (2021). BirdNET: A deep learning solution for avian diversity monitoring. Ecological Informatics, 61, 101236. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ecoinf.2021.101236

Miller, D. A., Nichols, J. D., McClintock, B. T., Grant, E. H. C., Bailey, L. L., & Weir, L. A. (2011). Improving occupancy estimation when two types of observational error occur: non-detection and species misidentification. Ecology, 92, 1422–1428. https://doi.org/10.1890/10-1396.1