Xeno-canto

xeno-canto is a citizen science project and repository in which volunteers record, upload and annotate recordings of birds, orthoptera, bats, frogs and land mammals. Since it began in 2005, it has collected over 1,000,000 sound recordings from more than 12,900 species worldwide, and has become one of the biggest open collections of wildlife sounds in the world. All the recordings are published under one of the Creative Commons licenses, including some with open licences. Each recording on the website is accompanied by a spectrogram and location data on a map displaying geographical variation.

Data from xeno-canto has been re-used in many (a few thousand) scientific papers. It has also been the source of data for an annual challenge on automatic birdsong recognition ("BirdCLEF") since 2014, conducted as part of the Conference and Labs of the Evaluation Forum.

The website is supported by a number of academic and birdwatching institutions worldwide, with its primary support being in the Netherlands.