DeepForestSound: a multi-species automatic detector for passive acoustic monitoring in African tropical forests, a case study in Kibale National Park

TL;DR

DeepForestSound is a semi-supervised, multi-species acoustic detection model tailored for African tropical forests, demonstrating high accuracy and generalization across taxa and time in biodiversity monitoring.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel semi-supervised pipeline with low-rank adaptation fine-tuning for multi-species detection in tropical forests, outperforming existing tools.

Findings

DFS achieves AP of 0.964 for primates and 0.961 for elephants.

LoRA fine-tuning outperforms linear probing across taxa.

Region-specific training improves detection in complex tropical environments.

Abstract

Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) is widely used for biodiversity assessment. Its application in African tropical forests is limited by scarce annotated data, reducing the performance of general-purpose ecoacoustic models on underrepresented taxa. In this study, we introduce DeepForestSound (DFS), a multi-species automatic detection model designed for PAM in African tropical forests. DFS relies on a semi-supervised pipeline combining clustering of unannotated recordings with manual validation, followed by supervised fine-tuning of an Audio Spectrogram Transformer (AST) using low-rank adaptation, which is compared to a frozen-backbone linear baseline (DFS-Linear). The framework supports the detection of multiple taxonomic groups, including birds, primates, and elephants, from long-term acoustic recordings. DFS was trained on acoustic data collected in the Sebitoli area, in Kibale National Park, Uganda, and evaluated on an independent dataset recorded two years later at different locations within the same forest. This evaluation therefore assesses generalization across time and recording sites within a single tropical forest ecosystem. Across 8 out of 12 taxons, DFS outperforms existing automatic detection tools, particularly for non-avian taxa, achieving average AP values of 0.964 for primates and 0.961 for elephants. Results further show that LoRA-based fine-tuning substantially outperforms linear probing across taxa. Overall, these results demonstrate that task-oriented, region-specific training substantially improves detection performance in acoustically complex tropical environments, and highlight the potential of DFS as a practical tool for biodiversity monitoring and conservation in African rainforests.