Tuning into the city soundscape: Optimizing Convolutional Neural Networks for avian acoustic identification in the neotropics and evaluating their performance against established monitoring approaches.
Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have become increasingly prominent in biodiversity monitoring due to their strong performance in accurately detecting species from sound recordings, overcoming some limitations of traditional methods such as point-counts. Yet, their use in urban ecosystems remains limited, highlighting the need for frameworks that identify modelling strategies to optimize their performance in these complex soundscapes. Here, we evaluated how preprocessing and labelling strategies, detection thresholds, sample size, and architecture affect the performance of CNNs for bird identification in urban tropical ecosystems. We also assessed its potential by comparing CNN-derived biodiversity estimates with those from point-counts and acoustic indices. For this, we used one week of recordings collected along urbanization gradients in five Colombian Andes cities to develop 11 multiclass CNN models varying in spectral representation, labelling strategies, training data source and backbone architecture. The best-performing model, evaluated with F1-scores, combined Log-Mel spectrograms, multispecies labels, ecosystem-specific and XenoCanto recordings, a probability threshold of 0.3 and a ConvNeXt backbone with its performance generally improving with sample size. Although CNNs and point counts detected partially distinct assemblages, CNN-derived species richness was higher to that estimated from point-counts. Additionally, the Normalized Difference Soundscape Index (NDSI) was positively associated with richness, suggesting its potential as a biodiversity proxy in tropical urban soundscapes. Overall, by identifying effective modelling designs and monitoring strategies, our study advances the development of robust biodiversity assessment frameworks in urbanized ecosystems in the Neotropics whilst highlighting the potential of acoustic approaches for avian monitoring and providing methodological guidance for future research and practical insights for wildlife monitoring and conservation.