/ Recent content on RUMINATING ON THE RANGE Hugo -- gohugo.io en-us Copyright © 2021-2025, Mike Proctor; all rights reserved. Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ Fri, 14 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ Mike Proctor Madill, Oklahoma. Dabbler in Data, Wielder of Words, Doer of Deeds. I have a variety of interests in range and wildlife ecology and the application of technology to the study of ecological systems. Hobbies include growing my beard and general trophy husband activities. CV Publications ResearchGate ORCID Contact Us: Me My Beard /2023/01/20/birdnet-pi-intro/ Fri, 20 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /2023/01/20/birdnet-pi-intro/ BirdNET Pi Using machine learning/AI and a Raspberry Pi to monitor avian diversity. Ornithologists have been using bird calls to identify the presence of species and to estimate populations of birds for a very long time. There are few drawbacks to that method however. Bird surveys, conducted to estimate bird abundance, tend to start really early in the morning. On top of that, trained ornithologists are rare “birds” - there’s seldom one around when you need them. /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-config-files/ Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-config-files/ Config files for deploying BirdNET-Pi in field /etc/wpa-supplicant-wlan0.conf Rename original file Install this first - autoAP GNU nano 5.4 wpa_supplicant.conf * ctrl_interface=DIR=/var/run/wpa_supplicant GROUP=netdev update_config=1 ap_scan=1 network={ ssid="BirdNET" # This is a guest network on my home router psk="secretpwd" key_mgmt=WPA-PSK id_str="Home" priority=20 } network={ ssid="WildBirds" # This is the AP that the Pi will set up psk="reallysecretpwd" key_mgmt=WPA-PSK mode=2 id_str="BirdNet" priority=10 } /etc/rc.local #!/bin/sh -e # # rc.local # # This script is executed at the end of each multiuser runlevel. /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-detections/ Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-detections/ Detections How is a “detection” defined by BirdNET? The system records for 15 secs, then slices that 15 sec recording into five intervals of three seconds each. Each three second interval gets analyzed which results in a species name and a confidence value for that species for each interval. Exceeding a default threshold of 0.7 for the confidence value qualifies as a “detection”. The detection with the highest confidence value is recorded. /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-power-management/ Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-power-management/ Power Management Getting a BirdNet-Pi up and running is a pretty good accomplishment in itself. However, depending upon what your interests are, there may still be some limitations to overcome. Really good bird habitat tends not to be associated with good WiFi, or electricity for that matter. How do you deploy a Birdnet-Pi off down in the creek bottom where all the cool birds are - or the pasture to see how grazing practices are influencing bird populations? /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-rtc-hats/ Wed, 18 Jan 2023 00:00:00 +0000 /2023/01/18/birdnet-pi-rtc-hats/ RTC Hats for RPI The first issue one encounters when trying to deploy BirdNET-Pi in the field is that of power management. This is followed closely by “How do I get the Pi to turn itself off? As it turns out, it’s pretty easy to get the Pi to turn itself off, simply adding a line to rc.local will do the trick. How do I get the Pi to turn itself back on? /2022/11/26/birdnet-pi-installation/ Sat, 26 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/11/26/birdnet-pi-installation/ BirdNET-Pi-Installation Pre-install suggestions If you are going to use your system on a wireless network, have your credentials available before you start the installation - the install asks for them, so you can access the Pi headlessly without jumping through hoops later to configure it. I also set up a guest network on my router specifically for the Pi. This helps when testing the Access Point because I can disable that network without affecting the rest of the network - other than having to reboot the router occasionally. /2022/11/23/birdnet-pi-hardware/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/11/23/birdnet-pi-hardware/ BirdNET-Pi - Hardware considerations RTC Raspberry Pis don’t have a real time clock(RTC) so they lose date and time if not connected to network on power loss. You can set this manually or there are add on components that provide a RTC. Microphones etc TRRS omni directional is ideal for a sampling application like I was doing, but a shotgun mic worked and had better detections - just not all directions. /2022/11/23/birdnet-pi-odds-and-ends/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/11/23/birdnet-pi-odds-and-ends/ Odds and Ends Useful applications A network scanner for your wireless device can be helpful - I use Fing. Fing allows me to figure out what IP/network a device is on as well as what servers are running on a device. The more devices you manage, the more useful this sort of thing becomes. Fing PuTTY - an SSH client. I do most of my Pi configuration through PuTTY /2022/11/23/birdnet-pi-operation/ Wed, 23 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/11/23/birdnet-pi-operation/ BirdNET-Pi-Operation Once the Pi reboots from setup, and gets everything up and running (it takes a couple of minutes sometimes), you should be good to go. If you entered credentials for your wireless network you should be able to access BirdNET through any browser on the network by accessing birdnetpi1.local unless you changed that during setup. When using Putty to access the system, you’ll have to know the ip of the Pi - this is where Fing comes in handy. /2022/05/22/anthropocene-noise/ Sun, 22 May 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/05/22/anthropocene-noise/ Anthropogenic Noise on the Range Painted Bunting interrupted by aircraft noise. Anthropogenic Noise interrupts Painted Bunting The above image is a spectrogram of a Painted Bunting (the evenly spaced vertical squiggles) that was interrupted by engine noise from an aircraft overhead. The ripples are the aircraft - the frequencies get higher as the aircraft approaches. When the frequencies get up into the range of the bunting call he stops calling, until they subside as the aircraft gets further away. /2022/02/23/paintbrush-ponderings/ Wed, 23 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/02/23/paintbrush-ponderings/ Alan Nelson’s key to Oklahoma Castilleja from Keys and Descriptions For The Vascular Flora of Oklahoma. What started out as a quick photo for a simple post turned into an afternoon of studying multiple taxonomic keys, distribution maps and pollination ecology. Since I work in the border counties along the Red River in Oklahoma, my primary reference for plant identification is the Flora of North Central Texas (FNCT). /2022/02/16/landscape-linguistics-ii/ Wed, 16 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/02/16/landscape-linguistics-ii/ Oak savanna with encroaching brush A previous post provides some context to the following discussion but isn’t required. Landscapes provide lots of information regarding their current and historical status. We just have to learn to listen - or see. A large Post Oak surrounded by much smaller Shumard oaks, cedars and ashes. The big oak on the right of the above image has no lower limbs, nor does it have recent burn scars. /2022/02/15/landscape-linguistics/ Tue, 15 Feb 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /2022/02/15/landscape-linguistics/ Eastern Redcedar seedling in understory The Language of the Land The quality of the story depends on the skill of the listener. Rumor has it that the Inuit have a hundred or so words in their language for “snow”. I’m sure that most of those would be lost on me because I simply don’t have the sophistication to distinguish them. Having grown up in Southern Oklahoma where there’s no guarantee we’ll even see snow from one year to next - I never developed that much of an appreciation for it outside of the fact that sometimes it makes better snowballs(and hurts worse when you get hit). /2021/12/18/range-ecology-network/ Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /2021/12/18/range-ecology-network/ Looking at Range Ecology as a Network The following is a convoluted attempt to capture and visualize many of the relationships involved in rangelands. While certainly not exhaustive, the objective was to at least demonstrate representative relationships taking place on the landscape. Relationships are depicted by a combination of “nodes” , which are any factors capable of influencing any other factor, and “edges” (the lines between nodes) which indicate the direction(s) of that relationship. /2021/12/11/rudimentary-r-and-necessary-knowledge/ Sat, 11 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /2021/12/11/rudimentary-r-and-necessary-knowledge/ The Bare Necessesities Learning R from scratch can be an onerous task. When I first started to learn programming, the only development environment was a text editor, and mice were just vermin that you really didn’t want in the computer lab. There just wasn’t that much to learn at once. Things have changed. Not only are you trying to learn the syntax of R but the idiosyncrasies of an IDE(RStudio), and all the assorted details like data structures and types. /2021/11/19/disturbingly-undisturbed/ Fri, 19 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /2021/11/19/disturbingly-undisturbed/ Too much of the same is rarely a good thing. For the most part we have a very narrow concept of what native rangeland vegetation should look like. That view tends to be very static. We don’t realize that what we see on a single visit is not necessarily what it will look like on the next visit. What we lack awareness of is how the plant communities vary over time depending on what is taking place on the landscape. /2021/11/15/packages-and-libraries-in-r/ Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /2021/11/15/packages-and-libraries-in-r/ Packages/Libraries These are scripts written by others that deal with a specific task or types of data. For example the “lubridate” package deals entirely with formatting and working with dates and times. The capacity to use scripts contributed by others are one of the things that make R (and Python) so useful. Whatever you are trying to do, someone has probably developed one or more packages to deal with it. /2021/11/15/pane-layout-in-rstudio/ Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /2021/11/15/pane-layout-in-rstudio/ Pane layout in RStudio Upon opening RStudio there are some areas of interest to point out. The location of these may vary depending on whose machine you are looking at as they can be customized to personal preferences. The RStudio interface consists of four “panes”. These panes show different types of information related to your code. Some also have their own tabs at the top that pertain to different types of information. /2021/11/15/setting-up-a-project-in-rstudio/ Mon, 15 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /2021/11/15/setting-up-a-project-in-rstudio/ Setting up a project in RStudio Projects in RStudio act something like a container for your “project”. Working with projects helps to keep your files and data organized. (You don’t technically have to use a project but life will be easier.) Setting a project up really isn’t as complex as it sounds. Start RStudio, click on “File/Project” and either create a folder or select a folder for the project.