Towards Large Scale Ecoacoustic Monitoring with Small Amounts of Labeled Data

Arctic boreal forests are warming at a rate 2–3 times faster than the global average. It is important to understand the effects of this warming on the activities of animals that migrate to these environments annually to reproduce. Acoustic sensors can monitor a wide area relatively cheaply, producing large amounts of data that need to be automatically analyzed. In such scenarios, only a small proportion of the recorded data can be labeled by hand, thus we explore two methods for utilizing labels more efficiently: self-supervised learning using wav2vec 2.0 and data valuation using k-nearest neighbors approximations to compute Shapley values. We confirm that data augmentation and global temporal pooling improve performance by more than 30%, demonstrate for the first time the utility of Shapley data valuation for audio classification, and find that our wav2vec 2.0 model trained from scratch does not improve performance.