When science listens: A global bank of bird songs to protect biodiversity
by Miguel Hernández University
March 16, 2026
What do birds tell us when they sing? Thanks to a new global bank of bird sounds, we can now better “hear” the state of ecosystems and protect them more intelligently.
An international team coordinated by biologist Esther Sebastián-González, from the University of Alicante (UA), and Cristian Pérez-Granados, from the Centre for Forest Science and Technology of Catalonia (CTFC), has created the World Annotated Bird Acoustic Dataset (WABAD), a large public inventory of bird songs. It compiles 5,047 minutes of audio with more than 90,000 vocalizations from 1,192 species, recorded in 72 habitats across five continents. Each fragment is annotated second by second, indicating which species is singing at any given moment. The study was published in the scientific journal Ecology, in its February 2026 issue.
Keep reading (in Spanish): https://satdi.umh.es/2026/03/16/cuando-la-ciencia-escucha-un-banco-mundial-de-cantos-de-aves-para-cuidar-la-biodiversidad/
Read the Ecology paper: https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecy.70317