Teaching with the Macaulay Library: An Online Archive of Animal Behavior Recordings

Abstract

<p>Using video and audio recordings of animal behavior, students in a variety of courses can pose questions and gather data from diverse species and locations to test their hypotheses. Such recordings are freely available online in the Macaulay Library, the world’s largest scientifically curated archive of natural history media. Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, the Macaulay Library currently houses about 50,000 video clips and 123,300 audio recordings (including the sounds of 75 percent of the world’s bird species, and recordings dating back to 1929). This article, aimed at faculty teaching biology and environmental science courses, summarizes how to search the online archive and visualize streaming sound files with Raven Viewer. It also describes how instructors have used these tools in introductory and upper-level laboratory and lecture classes as part of the NSF-funded Online Research in Biology project.</p

Sistema de Informação Ambiental: proposta de adequações ao módulo de fauna para sua utilização como uma ferramenta de apoio à aprendizagem

“…Um exemplo de aplicação que utiliza este método para o ensino e incentivo à pesquisa é a Macauley Library [19]. O SIA possui características que possibilitam o uso dessa ferramenta, pois, foi modelado para receber e armazenar grande quantidade de informação e dados.…”

Letter to the Editor

“…Please consider printing our Letter to the Editor suggesting revised instructions for an activity published in JMBE that is no longer applicable in its published form. In this Letter we describe a retooling of a sound analysis activity ( 1 ) that now requires the uncoupling of sound archives from the sound analysis software because the Raven Viewer software required to visualize sounds is discontinued and no longer supported by Macaulay Library. Free Raven Lite software (Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at The Cornell Lab of Ornithology; http://ravensoundsoftware.com/software/raven-lite/ ) can be substituted in place of Raven Viewer.…”

“…In the original paper, the value of the Macaulay Library archives was introduced ( 1 ), and strategies for integrating authentic animal sound recordings in biology courses to facilitate student understanding of speciation and animal behavior were described. The authors provided several examples of how the Macaulay Library digital sound archives ( https://www.macaulaylibrary.org/ ) were being used in diverse college classrooms around the country to analyze sound spectrograms (sonograms) by visually analyzing sounds in real time.…”

“…Raven Lite permits sound variables like frequency, amplitude, voltage, and duration of song sound elements of any single sound archive to be dissected and independently examined. The primary objective of encouraging the use of Macaulay Library archives by students remains true ( 1 ). Instructors can continue to introduce the Macaulay Library and can continue to have students explore authentic video and sound files that correspond to authentic field records and data.…”

Challenges and opportunities for measuring student outcomes of undergraduate research

“…[1] Thus there is keen interest in developing alternatives to apprentice-model UR that can accommodate more students earlier and at lower cost-especially curricular forms that may be called "research-based courses," "course-embedded research," or "course-based undergraduate research experiences." Variations include lab courses based on systems well suited to student experimentation, [13] analysis of existing citizen science data, [14] or very large-scale distributed projects that use students to gather many variants of a particular observation. [15,16] Efforts to define whether and how such courses constitute "research" have focused on identifying their key elements, for example, those proposed by Corwin Auchincloss et al: [17] 1) The project includes an element of scientific discovery; its outcomes are not predetermined.…”