Bugg - The Real-Time Eco Acoustic Monitoring Device
Conceptualized in the minds of the Ecosystem Sensing Research Group at Imperial College London, Bugg is an intelligent, real-time eco acoustic monitoring device. It is one of the few real-time eco monitoring devices on the market, and is designed to receive power from an off-grid solar setup. This allows it to monitor biodiversity over large areas and over long periods of time, without the need to go into the field and replace any batteries. Which, when deploying multiple devices, saves a lot of time and energy.
You can access your Bugg through your own Google Cloud Services, where you can configure the Bugg and build out your own automated analyses and reporting systems. This gives you more control over your device and the data it collects. There is a repository of information, including detailed diagrams, photos, and guides provided by Bugg to help you better utilize your device.
The Bugg hardware is housed in a tough gray case that will keep your device safe from all kinds of weather. Everything comes ready-to-use in the custom designed case; from the full spectrum Microphone (20Hz - 80kHz), to the SD and SIM card, and the antenna that allows you to upload your data in near real-time. Sealed with a thick rubber gasket, there’s no need to worry about your Bugg in the wild.
Something that takes Bugg to another level is the ability to hook up external microphones with 48V phantom power. If you’re not familiar with phantom power, which I wasn’t before writing this, it is a way of powering microphones by sending the electrical current through a balanced XLR cable instead of any large and bulky external power supply. This means that you can hook it up to condenser microphones – which have a wide frequency range, are more sensitive (which means you can pick up sounds further away), and deliver clean, accurate audio.
Bugg made its debut in the world of eco acoustic monitoring with The Sound of Norway project, which monitors over thirty sights across Norway to track the migration of different bird species. From the inception of the project, The Sound of Norway has collected over 135,500 hours of recordings that have yielded over a million detections from fifty-six different species.
Bugg has been an instrumental part of the process, especially when it has been integrated with advanced machine learning algorithms to help detect species and anomalies automatically. This saves researchers a lot of time and effort, otherwise they would have to manually listen to hours and hours of recordings to identify bird calls.
The Sound of Norway team plans to use the data they retrieved with Bugg to create machine learning models to include other species such as frogs, deer, and crickets.
Back in 2022 Open Acoustic Devices, creator of the AudioMoth and HydroMoth, introduced us to the Bugg team. Familiar with AudioMoth and our involvement in the process, Dr. Sarab Sethi, along with Jeffrey Gough and his consultancy, Monad, were happy to work with us.
I think everyone in the tech sphere remembers the part shortage of 2022. Well, at the time Bugg was not a fully fleshed-out product, and we needed a batch of prototypes to help work out the bugs (yes, pun intended). 2022 put a pin in that.
After a long wait, I’m sure you all can sympathize, the first pre-production units were made and assembled by GroupGets and sent to Jeff at Monad for testing and evaluation. The hardware needed some revision before it could be production-ready, but luckily by this time the supply chains were getting back on their feet and components were more readily available.
We started with a small batch - less than 200 units - so that we could do a thorough examination to identify any issues or possible imperfections caused by the manufacturing process. Jeff Gough developed an extensive testing process which GroupGets performed on each individual unit.
Any failed units are being studied for future improvement, while all the ones that passed testing have been shipped out. We will soon be ready to start taking orders for more Buggs.
The majority of this Bugg rollout is going to TABMON, the Transnational Acoustic Biodiversity Monitoring Network, with over 120 units being deployed for a Europe-wide bird monitoring project. Their goal with this project is to “develop a transnational biodiversity monitoring with autonomous acoustic sensors across a large latitudinal range in Europe.”
TABMON has chosen Bugg due to its ability to reduce the labor involved with large deployments, and they want to go bigger than the current largest existing acoustic biodiversity monitoring networks, which only span a single country. They’re relying on Bugg’s fully autonomous, network-connected, and cloud-native monitoring system to get the job done.
TABMON plans to use existing audio data from citizen science efforts, and national networks (including The Sound of Norway), to work through and discover any intrinsic biases, and “fill taxonomic gaps in existing coverage, including night-active birds and nocturnal migrants.”
This last photo is from a deployment in Taiwan, showing us that Bugg knows no boundaries when it comes to eco acoustic monitoring. It's just a matter of time before you find one in a forest near you.
If you’re interested in getting your hands on your own Bugg, or even a whole colony of them, please reach out to us. We would love to help get you on your acoustic monitoring feet.
All photos were taken by GroupGets or provided to GroupGets by Dr. Sethi, a member of the Bugg team, and professor at the Imperial College London.