🔈Sound on! Using sound and AI to monitor for invasive species? Sounds like a load of bull…bullfrogs, that is! 💻🐸 American bullfrogs may be native to your area if you live in the eastern US, but out west they are highly invasive, causing big problems for native wildlife. These big frogs eat everything, breed quickly, and spread far, outcompeting native amphibians and spreading disease. They are also pretty noisy. Males advertise during breeding season with the deep, booming vocalizations you can hear in this post (sound on!). USGS scientists are using these calls to monitor new invasions into previously uninvaded habitats and assess effectiveness of eradication efforts. Automatic recording units set up by our scientists record thousands of hours of audio data during the bullfrog breeding season. At the end of the field season, researchers download the audio data. As you might imagine, there’s a lot more data than researchers can possibly listen to, so they use AI to process i...