双语新闻：科学家们尝试通过倾听来了解野生动物

A team of scientists is studying the sound of the forest in Ecuador to learn how artificial intelligence (AI) could follow animal life in recovering environments.

一组科学家正在研究厄瓜多尔森林的声音，以了解人工智能(AI)如何在恢复环境中跟踪动物生活。

When scientists want to measure new forest growth, they can study large areas of land with tools like satellites and lidar.

当科学家想要测量新的森林生长时，他们可以用卫星和激光雷达等工具研究大面积的土地。

But understanding how fast and in what amount wildlife is returning to an area is more difficult. Sometimes it requires an expert to listen through sound recordings and pick out animal calls.

但是了解野生动物回归的速度和数量是比较困难的。有时它需要专家通过录音来挑选动物的叫声。

Jorg Muller is a field expert on birds at the University of Wurzburg Biocenter in Germany. He wondered if there was a different way.

Jorg Muller是德国维尔茨堡大学生物中心的鸟类专家。他想知道有没有别的办法。

Muller told the French news agency AFP: "I saw the gap that we need, particularly in the tropics, better methods to quantify the huge diversity... to improve conservation actions."

穆勒告诉法新社:“我看到了我们需要的差距，特别是在热带地区，更好的方法来量化巨大的多样性……以改善保护行动。”

So, he turned to bioacoustics, which uses sound to learn more about animal life and the environments in which they live.

所以，他转向了生物声学，利用声音来了解更多关于动物生活和它们生活的环境。

The tool has been used by scientists for some time. But more recently, researchers are using it with computer learning to study large amounts of data more quickly.

科学家们使用这个工具已经有一段时间了。但最近，研究人员正在将其与计算机学习结合起来，以更快地研究大量数据。

Muller and his team recorded wildlife sounds at sites in Ecuador's Choco area. The environments they recorded included areas that were once used for agriculture and raising livestock to old-growth forests.

穆勒和他的团队在厄瓜多尔乔科地区的一些地点记录了野生动物的声音。他们记录的环境包括曾经用于农业和饲养牲畜的地区到原始森林。

They first had experts listen to the recordings and index the sounds of different animals. Then, they examine the sound quality to measure the environment.

他们首先让专家听录音，并将不同动物的声音编入索引。然后，他们检查声音质量来测量环境。

Finally, they ran two weeks of recordings through an AI computer program trained to understand 75 different bird calls.

最后，他们通过一个人工智能计算机程序进行了两周的录音，该程序经过训练，可以理解75种不同的鸟类叫声。

More recordings needed

需要更多录音

The program was able to pick out the calls on which it was trained. However, scientists wondered if the program could correctly identify the number of different kinds of plants and animals in each environment.

该程序能够挑选出它接受过训练的电话。然而，科学家们想知道该程序是否能正确识别每种环境中不同种类动植物的数量。

To see if the program could do that, the team used two different controls. One was from the experts who listened to the audio recordings, and the second was based on examples from each environment, which can be used to understand biodiversity.

为了检验这个程序是否能做到这一点，研究小组使用了两种不同的控制方法。一份来自听录音的专家，另一份来自每个环境的例子，可以用来理解生物多样性。

Since the amount of available sounds used to train is limited, the AI program could only identify one-fourth of the bird calls that experts could. But it was still able to correctly measure biodiversity levels in each environment, the study said.

由于用于训练的可用声音数量有限，人工智能程序只能识别专家所能识别的四分之一的鸟叫声。但该研究称，它仍然能够正确地测量每种环境中的生物多样性水平。

The research was published recently in Nature Communications. The study said the scientists' results show that the AI program is a powerful tool to measure the recovery of animal communities in tropical forests.

这项研究最近发表在《自然通讯》杂志上。该研究称，科学家的研究结果表明，人工智能程序是衡量热带森林动物群落恢复的有力工具。

The research noted that biodiversity found from recordings can be quantified in a cost-effective and complete way. And it said that it can measure environments, "... from active agriculture to recovering and old-growth forests."

该研究指出，从记录中发现的生物多样性可以以成本效益和完整的方式量化。它说它可以测量环境，“……从活跃的农业到恢复和原始森林。”

There are still areas for improvement, including the lack of animal sounds on which to train AI models. And the method can only capture animals that use sound to communicate.

仍有需要改进的地方，包括缺乏用于训练人工智能模型的动物声音。而且这种方法只能捕捉到用声音交流的动物。