Arbimon in 2023
January 11, 2024
As the new year begins, the Arbimon team is incredibly grateful for the exponential growth that the platform has seen in 2023! Arbimon has solidified its position as the world’s largest library of soundscapes, bringing together a diverse community of users, researchers, and partners dedicated to understanding and conserving biodiversity around the world. Together with the Rainforest Connection (RFCx) team, Arbimon’s vibrant user community is demonstrating the enormous potential and real impact that collaborative, accessible tools facilitate in conservation.
The past year was marked by historic milestones in Arbimon’s number of users, projects, recordings, detected species, impactful contributions to biodiversity research and conservation initiatives. With a remarkable 2,097 new users joining the platform last year, our Arbimon community now boasts an impressive 6,050 members to-date. These users are working on 4,200 different projects, 25% of which were created in the past year!
Our users contributed an astounding 54,668,000 new recordings to Arbimon in 2023, bringing the platform’s total to more than 150 million recorded minutes. These recordings come from 119 countries, with a notable concentration in biodiversity hotspots such as the Amazon basin, Caribbean islands, Madagascar, and southeast Asian rainforests.
The Arbimon community detected 911 additional species in 2023, 105 of which are threatened with extinction (IUCN RedList). These included diverse species such as the indri of Madagascar, helmeted hornbill of Southeast Asia, moss frogs of South Africa, and blue-winged parrot of Australia. We’re particularly excited to be seeing Arbimon’s reach broaden into new taxonomic groups, with new detections of marine species such as the West Indian manatee, and of bats like the Thomas’s Sac-winged Bat.
We are now entering 2024 with over 4,000 species detected in the platform’s recordings, from birds and bats to mammals and frogs (and more!). Even better, our public template library now contains >11,000 reference spectrograms for 2,400+ species. These call templates serve as valuable tools for researchers, allowing them to streamline their data analysis workflows and contribute to our ever-growing, open library of species reference calls.
As the world’s biodiversity continues to face unprecedented threats, using technology (such as ecoacoustics) to monitor species remains a critical part of conservation. We are so thankful that Arbimon continues to play a leading role in detecting species and yielding biodiversity insights to inform conservation.
Arbimon’s growth also extends into scientific literature. In 2023, Arbimon was included in 24 publications, 17 of which utilized the platform for their analyses and 7 highlighted the platform’s growing recognition within the scientific community.
Arbimon remains steadfast in its commitment to innovation, collaboration, and accessible ecoacoustic resources.
Looking into 2024, we are excited about:
- additional AI features that will enhance Arbimon users’ species detection capabilities
- redesigned landing pages, launching soon, will provide users with a more intuitive and engaging experience
- a new community forum will facilitate better communication and interaction among our team and Arbimon users
- a HUGE announcement coming very soon…