Tech Professors Partner To Protect State’s Quail

A Tennessee Tech team combining biology and computer science to help prevent the state’s population of Northern Bobwhite Quail from shrinking.

The project uses artificial intelligence to identify a bobwhite’s unique call from recordings captured by autonomous recording units. Wildlife Ecology Associate Professor Bradley Cohen said the Northern Bobwhite population has been a concern for several years.

“We get the data if you will, those recordings we don’t know what species are singing or not,” Cohen said. “And so what we can do is we can actually work with computer science and they can create these machine learning algorithms that actually learn the song of a Northern Bobwhite.”

The number of bobwhite quail in the state is not known exactly. Cohen said that Northern Bobwhite’s decline in population is due to living in a unique habitat, and that habitat is declining.

“Northern Bobwhite need what we call early successional land, and that’s just basically imagine recently newly growing vegetation that has been recently disturbed,” Cohen said. “So after you come through and let’s say you cut a bunch of trees down, so that vegetation that comes up immediately after is the type of stuff that Northern Bobwhite thrive in.”

Cohen teamed up with computer science professor Doug Talbert and Grad Student Mateo Gannod on the project. The group started the project a year ago. Cohen said using computer science will make monitoring different kinds of wildlife more efficient.

“Just because you can’t hear them in that moment in time doesn’t mean they are not there,” Cohen said. “And so it was very laborious and time-consuming, so technology has really kind of helped make us much more efficient in our monitoring.”

Cohen said the group is also working closely with the Tennessee Wildlife Resources Agency to determine the population and areas where the quail are located.