Blog
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From What to Who? AI Learns to Recognize Individual Animals
Individual ID in Chatty Species In the wild, zebra finches don’t sing in isolation. They move through dynamic social groups, calling and responding to one another across space and time. For ecologists, understanding this communication requires knowing who is communicating with whom, and how information flows through a group. Tracking communication at the level of…
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What Can a Primate Face Tell Us? A Scalable Approach to Studying Facial Expressions
Anyone who has spent time observing primates knows how expressive their faces can be. A lip-smack, a brief glance, or a subtle shift of the mouth can signal curiosity, tension, submission, or affiliation. For ethologists, these fleeting expressions offer a rich window into the social dynamics of a group. Studying them, however, has traditionally required…
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Animal Language Processing: An AI Convergence In Animal Communication
We are starting to see the study of animal communication shift from narrowly defined, species-specific, and hypothesis-limited analyses toward data-driven discovery at scale. We refer to this convergence as Animal Language Processing (ALP), an approach that uses AI to study non-human communication at scale.
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We’re Hiring! Director of Development
About Earth Species Project Earth Species Project (ESP) is a non-profit using frontier AI to decode animal communication. We believe the exponential progress we’re seeing in AI offers new ways of looking at the world and expanding the ability of human beings to learn from other species. Our hope is that this will make a…
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Introducing Earth Species Project’s New CEO
Earth Species Project welcomes Steven VanRoekel as CEO. In this Q&A, Steve shares his vision for decoding animal communication with AI, his personal connection to wildlife, and what the next phase of growth looks like for ESP.
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Unlocking Avian Secrets: How Tiny Biologgers Are Revealing the Hidden Communication of Carrion Crows
Lightweight biologgers and ESP’s machine learning tools reveal the hidden vocal world of wild carrion crows, capturing over 127,000 calls from quiet murmurs to long-distance signals.
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What the World Thinks About AI and Animal Communication: Findings from Our First Global Survey
The first global survey on AI and animal communication reveals striking consensus: people worldwide recognize animals’ complex inner lives and demand technology that fosters connection, not exploitation.
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What Matters for Bioacoustic Encoding: A Practical Training Recipe for Building Generalizable Models
To better understand what matters for building a generalizable bioacoustic encoder, we tested 19 models across 26 datasets and a new evaluation benchmark. Our main finding is that a two-stage training approach—self-supervised pre-training followed by supervised post-training, both on a mix of bioacoustic and general audio—delivers the strongest performance.
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Hands-On with NatureLM-audio: A No-Code Demo
Explore NatureLM-audio, our open-source model for bioacoustics. Try the new demo to analyze animal sounds, identify species, and support research.
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Listening for Frogs at Scale: How FrogID Evaluated NatureLM-Audio on Real-World Data
FrogID, the world’s largest frog-focused citizen science project, tested Earth Species Project’s open-source NatureLM-audio model to help automate the validation of frog vocalizations submitted by the general public. Without fine-tuning, the model excelled at distinguishing frogs from other sounds, potentially saving the team 300+ hours of manual work annually. It also showed strong accuracy on…