Pooja Choksi's Contact Details

Pooja Choksi's Company Details

Project Dhvani

, , • 3 Employees
Environmental Services

Project Dhvani's uses sound to detect biodiversity, and understand the relationship between biodiversity and land cover, land uses and resource management.Automated detection for research and protectionCertain species can be identified from their vocalizations. Likewise, sounds like gunshots are distinct. Such sounds can be characterized from all other sounds and we use our sound recordings from India to test and develop automated methods to detect specific species and incidents of illegal activities. Automated methods that utilize machine learning algorithms can ‘listen' to a large amount of sound recordings that would otherwise be unfeasible for a person to manually process. Such methods have the potential to to detect incidents of poaching and illegal activities in real-time within protected areas (PA), thereby assisting in wildlife protection. Additionally, species of concern can be monitored across landscapes for longer periods of time than what is traditionally accomplished through traditional wildlife survey methods. Relationship with land cover and forest managementFaunal diversity differs as a response to vegetative composition, anthropogenic use and landscape management. We sample across a gradient of human forest uses: from protected areas to human-dominated areas (eg. timber and fruit tree plantations, degraded forests, village forest commons). An understanding of how measures of vocalizing biodiversity vary across this landscape as a function of human forest use and plantations enables efforts by local resource managers to promote biodiversity-friendly land uses while meeting human needs for food, fiber, and forest products.