One of the best, and worst, things about conservation acoustics is how easy and affordable it is to collect sound data. For the costs of paying one observer to sit in the field watching for animals, you could buy three or four acoustic recorders that can be used year after year. For any penny-pinching manager this is particularly enticing.
Unfortunately, while it is becoming ever easier to collect "gobs" of data it is also becoming more difficult to process it. For example, my PhD project will involve data collected from 43 sensors every summer for four years. I estimate the total storage requirements to be over 40TB of acoustic data. To put that in perspective, the chemistry department in St Andrews was just gifted a server of the same size-for the entire department.
Anyway, as sometimes happens, thousands of dollars worth of recording equipment are purchased and deployed and one or two people are hired to process the data.
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| Admin1: Researchers are expensive but acoustics recorders are cheap. Admin2: Then let's buy lots of recorders and hire one poor sop to process all the data. |
