The app is currently only able to identify cicada sounds, but for good reason. It was designed, Mashable explains, to help scientists monitor the population of the New Forest cicada, or Cicadetta montana, an endangered species.
The team behind the app is working to update it to identify 20 species of grasshopper and cricket, as well as birdsong.
Millions of people each year visit the New Forest, an ancient woodland west of Southampton, UK, New Scientist reports. Alex Rogers and a team at the University of Southampton, who developed Cicada Hunt, hope that visitors will run the app in the background. Once the app recognizes the cicada’s cry, the phone will alert the user who can then record a brief sound clip and email it to researchers.
The team can then create a heat map that will show where the cicada populations are gathering.
The app uses a voice recognition system to distinguish the cicada’s cry from other species that make similar sounds, such as the dark bush cricket. The cicada’s cry is distinguished by the ratio of two wavelengths in its song.
The idea for crowd-sourcing the cicada information came from a network called eBird, which allows users to notify researchers when they identify rare birds.
The team first tested the app in Slovenia, and the technology easily identified cicada cries.
The app was presented at an artificial intelligence conference in Beijing, China on August 9.
