Postdoctoral Researcher in audio-based avian ecology
About this role
Deaprtment of Biological and Environmental Science is seeking to recruit a Postdoctoral Researcher in audio-based avian ecology for a fixed-term of three years. The position will start earliest June 2026 and latest September 2026.
The postdoctoral researcher to be recruited will focus on avian ecology using data acquired by acoustic sensors. Our existing database consists of two major sources: ca. 200 years of passive acoustic monitoring data collected in the globally distributed LIFEPLAN project (Hardwick et al. 2024, Somervuo et al. 2025), and citizen science data collected by 300,000 Finns by a smartphone app that we have developed (Ovaskainen et al. 2026). In addition to utilizing these existing data resources, the person to be recruited will collect new data using the BirdPipe device that we have developed for real-time acoustic monitoring through wireless communication (Ovaskainen et al. 2025). The species detections from the audio data will be inferred with machine learning based classifiers that we have developed in earlier research (Lauha et al. 2022), with the person to be recruited manually annotating for small subsets of the data for improving the classifiers and validating their outputs. The postdoctoral researcher will take leadership in small-scale field experiments and in addressing ecological research questions with the above mentioned data sources. The research environment consists of the multidisciplinary Predictive Community Ecology Group and the Finnish Digital Citizen Science Centre.
References:
Hardwick et al. 2024. LIFEPLAN: A worldwide biodiversity sampling design. PLOS ONE 19, e0313353. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0313353
Lauha et al. 2022. Domain-specific neural networks improve automated bird sound recognition already with small amount of local data. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 13, 2799-2810. https://doi.org/10.1111/2041-210X.14003
Ovaskainen et al. 2025. Building future monitoring together - towards improved acoustic moni