| Faculty Advisor |
Daizaburo Shizuka
|
|---|---|
| Contact Email | dshizuka2@nebraska.edu |
| Website | |
| Advisor College: |
Arts and Sciences
|
| Potential Student Tasks |
Students will be trained on acoustic analyses using software such as Raven Pro, Audacity, and R. One key component is annotating (i.e., marking) relevant sounds within a soundscape recording to manually extract reliable data. These data points can be analyzed directly, or may be used to train machine-learning algorithms to increase the scale of data extraction. Interested students may delve into emerging machine-learning and AI-based sound classifiers to take the research to the next level. |
| Student Qualifications |
The most important qualification is the ability to manage time, and to maintain good communication so that we can work around constraints like class and exam schedules. We welcome students who are deeply interested in ecology and natural resources but may not have prior research experience. Acoustic monitoring is a rapidly growing method/field within ecology and conservation, and this work will provide useful skillsets for entry into future opportunities. |
| Training, Mentoring, and Workplace Community |
The student's work will be overseen by Professor Shizuka, but the day-to-day work will be coordinated by the lab manager, who is a UNL grad who has direct experience with the challenges of working as an undergraduate student. The Shizuka Lab considers belonging and development of teamwork to be of primary importance. See the lab website (shizukalab.org) for more information. The work will be conducted at workstations in Manter Hall. Students will also be offered to join optional field research opportunities, such as bird banding and field data collection (often on weekends). Secondary contact: Aidan Hand, ahand6@huskers.unl.edu |
| Available Positions |
2
|
Animal sounds carry a lot of information about the environment, and other animals--both conspecifics and heterospecifics--use this information to make important decisions. For example, alarm calls of one species may indicate the presence of predators nearby, or recruitment calls from one species may induce other species to come join a foraging flock. We have several projects to look at within- and across-species acoustic communication among forest birds, marsh birds, and shorebirds. We use a variety of approaches to understand how these "soundscapes" (playback experiments, body cams, microphone arrays) affect the ecology of birds.