An innovative project has been launched which uses birdsong to monitor wildlife, thereby enabling farmers to make informed decisions about sustainable practices.

A collaboration between the UK Agri-Tech Centre and Chirrup.ai, the project has launched the groundbreaking technology to make nature monitoring simpler and cheaper, making it an affordable solution for measuring and managing biodiversity.

See also: Why agri-tech and nature have a place on the farm of the future

The project, called ChirrupNano, with funding from Innovate UK, has developed a next-generation bio-recorder.

Recorders are delivered straight to the farm and can be deployed in sun and shade, in remote fields and in woodland – wherever it’s needed.

Chirrup’s artificial intelligence technology already recognises more than 100 species from Great Britain and Ireland, and this is growing. Along with the recorder, the redesigned website app lets farms compare their species lists to others, to standard benchmarks and even their own past performance.

Hayley Gerry, project manager at the UK Agri-Tech Centre, explains that birds are ecological barometers.

Birds are everywhere, super responsive to change and their presence tells a story about the thriving life in the places they occupy – from insects and plants to clean water and the general quality of the ecosystem.

She adds: “To enable sustainable farming, we need to encourage multi-species habitats to enrich the areas, which in turn makes the farming of livestock and arable products sustainable.

“In order to do this we need to be able to measure the baseline of the current situation, and that is where this project comes in.”

Next steps

The project will be put to the test in the spring of 2025 across the UK.

An expert ornithologist and ecologists will analyse and validate the results while the UK Agri-Tech Centre will help Chirrup.ai to link outcomes to agricultural practices.