Dutch Data Prize 2024 win: Sharing wildlife sounds from all over the world
Xeno-canto is a citizen science project where volunteers can record, upload and annotate recordings of wildlife sounds. The dataset is a figurehead of FAIRness. One of the reasons it became the winner of the Dutch Data Prize 2024 in the Life Sciences and Health category.
The dataset has existed online since 2005. It contains over 575.000 sound recordings from more than 10.000 species, and has become one of the biggest collections of bird sounds in the world. Xeno-canto is a citizen science project. One of the basic principles is that Creative Commons licenses are used and recordings are always shared freely with others. Furthermore there is no authority: everyone is always welcome to discuss recordings via the online forums. You must be a member, but a membership of xeno-canto is free of charge. In this way e.g. bird experts from less wealthy countries can also participate. Twenty years of equality and openness have yielded a lot. The website is used intensively, also for scientific research. And on Google Scholar, the name xeno-canto appears in 5.000 papers already.
The congratulations on winning the Dutch Data Prize poured in from all over the world. “That was fun,” says initiator Bob Planqué who created the website with his companion Willem-Pier Vellinga. “At such a moment you see how large the field is that we serve with our website.” Future plans with the dataset lay in the area of machine learning. An own algorithm learning to automatically recognize birds will give the possibilities to delve much deeper into the data in the coming years and give new impulses to the use of xeno-canto.
