Academy Professor Otso Ovaskainen receives ERC funding for real-time monitoring of Madagascar’s biodiversity

Biodiversity loss is accelerating worldwide, but in the protected areas of the Global South there is an acute lack of affordable, effective and rapid tools for monitoring ecological changes. Current biodiversity monitoring technologies generate vast amounts of data, but the results often reach local stakeholders only after a long delay, which diminishes their practical value.

The goal of Academy Professor Otso Ovaskainen’s BioSounds project is to create a real-time acoustic monitoring network to be deployed in 20 national parks in Madagascar. 

The system uses AI to automatically identify the sounds of birds, bats and lemurs, while also detecting human-caused threats, such as the sounds of chainsaws.

Wireless data transmission allows observations to be relayed in real time to local stakeholders. This enables the monitoring of biodiversity indicators and the issuance of early warnings can then be made within minutes of AI-generated observations.

The goal: a global standard for real-time monitoring of the state of nature

The project is based on research results achieved in the ERC-Synergy (Lifeplan) project, and it aims to transfer research knowledge into practical applications that have a significant societal impact.

The project’s technical implementation is ambitious: the equipment must operate reliably in tropical, humid conditions and challenging data transmission environments. 

The Jyväskylä Universities group will provide the project with cutting-edge research expertise in IoT automation and electrical engineering. The engineering expertise of Jamk University of Applied Sciences will complement biodiversity research and JYU’s technology development by developing an energy management solution for the equipment. 

A specific goal is to create autonomous research equipment suitable for global use, from the southern climate of Madagascar to the northern parts of Greenland.

“Together with an extensive international network of collaborators, we have done a tremendous amount of work in the Lifeplan project to develop of methods for biodiversity research,” says Academy Professor Otso Ovaskainen, the who is leading the project.

“It is really exciting to be able to put these new methods into practice.”

The BioSounds project is closely connected to Ovaskainen’s ongoing research, which is funded by the Research Council of Finland and the U.S. National Science Foundation. This research uses AI and wireless data transmission to study automated biodiversity sampling in Finland, Greenland and Madagascar.

The ERC Proof of Concept (PoC) funding is intended to support the commercialisation of ERC research project results or to increase their societal impact. The eighteen-month BioSounds project will begin on 1 December 2026.