Evaluation of acoustic pattern recognition of nightingale (Luscinia megarhynchos) recordings by citizens

Acoustic pattern recognition methods introduce new perspectives for species identification, biodiversity monitoring and data validation in citizen science but are rarely evaluated in real world scenarios. In this case study we analysed the performance of a machine learning algorithm for automated bird identification to reliably identify common nightingales (Luscinia megarhynchos) in field recordings taken by users of the smartphone app Naturblick. We found that the performance of the automated identification tool was overall robust in our selected recordings. Although most of the recordings had a relatively low confidence score, a large proportion of the recordings were identified correctly.