AudioMoth deployment
Tending the data garden, in the field
Walk through a full AudioMoth deployment as a community workflow — and identify the parts that are hardware (easy), software (medium), and protocol (the actual sovereignty).
Reading
The AudioMoth is a ~$80 open-source acoustic recorder developed by Open Acoustic Devices. Two AA batteries, a microSD card, a configurable recording schedule. A single device can listen to a forest for weeks at a time. A network of fifty, deployed by a community across a 100-hectare site, becomes a continuous bird, frog, insect, and chainsaw census — the kind of biodiversity inventory that traditionally required dozens of biologists on foot.
A deployment workflow looks deceptively short: charge batteries, flash the firmware schedule (e.g. record 1 min every 5 min, sunrise to mid-morning and dusk to early-night), pick a location, mount the device 1.5–2 m up a trunk with the microphone unobstructed, log the GPS coordinate, return on a scheduled cadence to swap SD cards. The hardware is easy. The schedule is medium. The protocol is the actual work — and the protocol is where sovereignty lives or dies.
GainForest’s deployments in the Southern Philippines and the Amazon answer the protocol questions before the first device leaves the box. The local community votes an annual data council (cf. Lesson 04). The council sets the per-minute price for recordings (~$0.01/min) which is paid to the community member who deployed and retrieved each unit, in stablecoins, via the Conservation Data Income mechanism. The council also names places we will never deploy — sacred sites, private homes, ceremonial grounds. And it defines the withdrawal pathway: which datasets can be pulled back, by whom, on what notice.
The same AudioMoth, deployed without any of those protocols, is a piece of data-extraction infrastructure. With them, it’s a piece of soil-tending infrastructure. The lesson of this course is not the device. It is the difference.
“Within CDI the market price for data is set by the community themselves. Every year, the community votes on a data council that governs data ownership, policy and pricing (e.g. 0.01 $ per min of bioacoustic recordings).”
Handouts for this lesson
Practise
Exercise
Plan a deployment your community could actually run
- 01Pick a real piece of land you care about — even just one hectare. Sketch a rough map on paper.
- 02Decide where you would place 10 AudioMoths. Mark them with X. Now mark with O at least three areas you would NEVER place one (sacred sites, private homes, ceremonial grounds, anywhere the community has not consented).
- 03Open the [AudioMoth field checklist](/handouts/audiomoth-field-checklist) and fill it in for one hypothetical deployment: schedule, retrieval cadence, naming convention, weather plan.
- 04Now the part that actually matters. Answer in writing: who reviews requests to use these recordings? What is the per-minute price? What is the withdrawal pathway? Who holds the SD cards between deployments?
- 05Watch the [GainForest AudioMoth field video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDTtGw_DFNU) and check your plan against what they actually do in the Philippines.
Knowledge check
An AudioMoth deployment without a community-defined boundary statement is…
In GainForest’s Conservation Data Income model, who sets the per-minute price for bioacoustic recordings?
Which of these failure modes is NOT actually about AudioMoth hardware?
Course complete
You’ve walked all 8 lessons.
Now run one in a room. Bring the handouts. Write back what changed.