Biophony: Wildlife Survey Log

New in 4.0: survey counts with Shannon and Simpson diversity, notebook backup and restore, Hilbert-envelope entropy and eBird 2026 names. Offline, no subscription.

Biophony turns your iPhone or iPad into a pocket bioacoustics field lab: record wildlife with a live spectrogram, schedule dawn-chorus sessions, import files from other recorders, box calls on the spectrogram, measure the soundscape with standard acoustic indices, keep point-count survey tallies with diversity statistics, and export everything in formats researchers already use. Everything runs on the device.

NEW IN 4.0

• Survey counts: log a count with each detection, add one more with a single tap, and pick labels from your earlier entries or the reference library.
• Diversity and effort summary: labels (S), Shannon H′, Pielou evenness, Gini–Simpson, Simpson’s unbiased index, inverse Simpson and exp(H′) for all visits or one site, with listening time, individuals per hour, counts by label and a label accumulation chart. Computed from what you logged; Biophony does not identify species.
• Notebook backup and restore: save the Survey Notebook as a JSON file and restore it later. Restoring only adds visits and never overwrites existing ones.
• Visit pages with counts, entries and per-visit diversity.
• Acoustic entropy now uses the Hilbert amplitude envelope for Ht, as defined by Sueur et al. (2008) and seewave. Results saved by earlier versions are labelled until you recompute them.
• Reference names updated: bird names follow the eBird/Clements 2026 taxonomy (for example Eurasian Blackbird, Diederik Cuckoo, Rufous-naped Lark now in Corypha); amphibian and insect names were checked against GBIF and the Catalogue of Life.

RECORD 24-bit PCM WAV at your device’s full sample rate in measurement mode, with pre-roll (up to 10 seconds before you tap Record), live markers, an input meter and a storage estimate. If a call or alarm interrupts a recording, the audio captured so far is saved.

SCHEDULE Record on a duty cycle (for example 1 minute every 10 minutes, up to 288 times), starting now, at a set time, or before or after local sunrise or sunset calculated on the device. The schedule keeps running with the screen locked; force-quitting the app or a phone call ends it, and finished files are kept.

IMPORT AND ANNOTATE Bring in WAV, AIFF, M4A, MP3 or FLAC files; embedded GUANO metadata, recorder comments and date-time file names set the recording time and location. Drag time–frequency boxes around calls, label them, play just that selection and read peak frequency and level. Export a selection table or label track.

ACOUSTIC INDICES ACI, ADI, AEI, BI, NDSI and acoustic entropy (H), computed segment by segment for recordings of any length with published default parameters, a timeline chart and a long-term spectral average. Indices are relative: compare recordings made with the same device and settings.

SOUNDSCAPE COMPOSITION An optional breakdown into biophony, geophony and anthrophony using Apple’s built-in on-device sound classifier. These are coarse, general sound classes, not species identification, and they can be wrong.

REFERENCE LIBRARY AND COMPARISON 83 openly licensed bird, amphibian and insect recordings, each credited in the app. Compare two clips side by side; “Match this window” ranks the library by spectral similarity to guide your own judgement. Biophony does not claim to identify species.

EXPORT Research-package ZIP per recording (audio with GUANO metadata, selection table, label track, indices and soundscape CSVs, metadata and a README), Field Log CSV, Survey Notebook CSV, summary CSV and JSON backup.

PRIVATE BY DESIGN No account, no subscription, no ads, no analytics. Works offline. Recordings, notes and any optional location stay on your device unless you export them. Pay once; everything is included.

ABOUT THE DATA Bundled reference recordings come from Wikimedia Commons under CC0, CC BY and public-domain terms; every author and licence is listed in About. The screenshots show sample recordings and visits that the app builds from those bundled clips; they are labelled as samples.