\nIn the face of rapid anthropogenic pressures of habitat modification and climate change, we need to utilize the latest conservation tools and technologies to monitor biodiversity. Through the Kaggle competition, we aim to carry out automated detection and classification of bird species of the Western Ghats from soundscapes.\n\nThe Western Ghats are a Global Biodiversity Hotspot, with the mountain range running along the southwestern coast of India. It is home to diverse ecosystems that support extraordinary levels of biodiversity. These ecosystems range from high-elevation forest-grassland mosaics to tropical dry deciduous forests to wet-evergreen rainforests, to name a few. Additionally, this region is home to large human populations whose livelihoods depend on the forests and the natural resources the region provides. From an avifaunal perspective, this region is home to high levels of bird diversity, with several endemic and endangered species found nowhere else. However, this mountain range is undergoing drastic landscape and climatic changes that negatively affect biodiversity. Hence, we need conservation technologies and tools to help us assess and monitor bird diversity rapidly.\n\nThe broader goals for this Kaggle competition include:\n
\n- (1) Identify endemic bird species of the sky-islands of the Western Ghats in soundscape data.
\n\n- (2) Detect/classify endangered bird species (species of conservation concern) featuring limited training data.
\n\n- (3) Detect/classify nocturnal bird species which are poorly understood.
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\n\nThis competition is collaboratively organized by (alphabetic order) the Chemnitz University of Technology, Google Research, Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER) Tirupati, K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, LifeCLEF, and Xeno-canto.\n \n