Dawn Chorus

Dawn Chorus is a citizen science and art project initiated by the Bavarian Natural History Museum in collaboration with BIOTOPIA Lab and the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. A close partner of the project is the Bavarian nature conservation association LBV (Landesbund für Vogel- und Naturschutz). Dawn Chorus invites people around the globe to participate and collect bird songs using their smartphones. The growing database provides important information for biodiversity research and is available for art projects. At the same time, AI-supported bird song recognition helps us to learn more about the species in our immediate environment.

Dawn Chorus: created in a moment of silence

During this brief moment of silence, project Dawn Chorus was brought to life by the Naturkundemuseum Bayern with BIOTOPIA LAB and the Foundation Arts and Nature (Nantesbuch), with support from the Max Planck Society. During an extremely short timeframe, a number of people came together to launch the project, inspired by the works of „father of soundscaping“, bioacoustician and musician, Bernie Krause (The Doors“, Frank Zappa, „The Weavers“). Since then, Dawn Chorus invites people from all across the globe to experience and to record the morning concert, to help make nature’s voice be heard. From 2022 with a new strong project partner, Landesbund für Vogelschutz in Bayern (LBV).

The scientific goal of Dawn Chorus is to monitor bird diversity over the years using sound recordings and the help of citizen scientists. The data from this “acoustic biomonitoring” helps to show changes in species composition. The main collecting period always takes place in May, when birds are breeding.
More info: https://dawn-chorus.org/

(Photo: Sommergoldhähnchen / Firecrest © Wolfgang Forstmeier)