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A finely annotated dataset for the automated acoustic identification of European Orthoptera and Cicadidae


Abstract

Mounting evidence points to widespread declines in insect abundance and diversity across European terrestrial ecosystems, highlighting an urgent need for effective large-scale monitoring methods. Passive acoustic monitoring enables the monitoring of sound-producing insects at an unprecedented temporal and spatial scale by remotely capturing sounds such as orthopteran stridulations and cicada timbalizations. However, current automated recognition tools for European insect sounds remain limited, and developing algorithms capable of reliably identifying diverse species requires large, ecologically heterogeneous acoustic datasets. Here we present a dataset of 11,224 recordings covering 193 orthopteran and 24 cicada species from North, Central, and temperate Western Europe. It combines coarsely labeled recordings, for which we can only infer the presence, at some point, of their target species (weak labeling), with finely annotated recordings that specify the time and frequency range of each insect sound (strong labeling). This dataset complements existing online resources and supports the advancement of automated acoustic classification for orthopterans and cicadas, aiding biodiversity monitoring efforts across Europe.

Data availability

All data have been deposited in the following Zenodo repository62: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15043892.

Code availability

All scripts used to generate the figures and tables in this paper, based on the collection of CSV files describing our dataset, are available at: https://github.com/DavidFunosas/ECOSoundSet_database_analysis. The script for retrieving all recordings from the selected online platforms based on GBIF query results is available at: https://github.com/DavidFunosas/GBIF_recording_download. The model used to assess the effect of audio segment duration on automated species recognition performance is available at: https://huggingface.co/AlexanderGbd/insects-base-cnn10-96k-t.

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Acknowledgements

We declare having received funding from the Psi-Biom project (French PIA 3 under grant number 2182D0406-A), from the French National Program (ANR) “Investment for Future-Excellency Equipment” (project TERRA FORMA, with the reference ANR-21-ESRE-0014), from LabEx Tulip and from coauthor MC’s discretionary funding from his Junior Professor Chair position Neo Sensation (ANR-23-CPJ1-0174-01). Acoustic research by coauthor TT was conducted as part of the program “Communities, relationships, and communication in ecosystems” (No. P1-0255), funded by the Slovenian Research and Innovation Agency, and part of the acoustic research by coauthors EM and DF was conducted as part of the SpatialTreeP project funded by French ANR (ANR-21-CE03-0002). We are deeply grateful to Roy Kleukers, Mathieu Pélissié, Jakub Burdzicki, Margaux Charra, Adrien Charbonneau, Daniel Espejo Fraga, Joss Deffarges, Lukasz Cudziło, Daniel Bizet, Ghislain Riou, Marta Celej, Marie-Lilith Patou, Blandine Carre, Antoine Chabrolle, Joan Ventura Linares, Marc Corail, Matija Gogala, Mathieu Sannier, Vincent Milaret, Alexis Laforge, Pere Pons, Joan Estrada Bonell, Florence Matutini, Benjamin Drillat, Berenger Remy, Adeline Pichard, Evgenia Kovalyova, Laura Martin, Remi Jullian, Alexandre Crégu, Aurélie Torres, Christian Kerbiriou, Marlene Massouh, Nicolas Mokuenko, Jérome Allain, Romain Riols, Varvara Vedenina, Benoit Nabholz, Carlos Álvarez-Cros, Elouan Meyniel, Gaëtan Jouvenez, Georges Bedrines, Nicolas Vissyrias, Celine Quelennec, Clement Lemarchand, Clementine Azam, Eric Sardet, Klaus Alix, Rafael Tamajón, Sylvain Grimaud, Julien Cavallo, Leslie Campourcy, Sébastien Merle, Tamás Kiss, Xavier Béjar, Aurélien Grimaud, Fabien Sane, Jocelyn Fonderflick, Justine Przybilski, Marc Anton, Thomas Armand, Cédric Mroczko, Philippe Gayet, Antone Thivolle, Stanislas Wroza and Werner Reitmeier, who granted us permission to incorporate their recordings into our dataset (Supplementary Table 2). We also want to thank Johanna Berger, Maren Teschauer, Benjamin Schmid, Orian Ly, Lutèce Mezzetta, Mathilde Lladó, Eva Blot and Léa Geng for their collaboration in the annotation of recordings, Alexander Teschke and Markus Rubenbauer for their help with maintaining recording sites, Thierry Feuillet for facilitating the collection of mountain orthopteran recordings through the SpatialTreeP project, and the www.ornitho.cat and sonotheque.mnhn.fr (from Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle) platforms for facilitating the access to some of the recordings in our dataset.

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Contributions

David Funosas: Writing – original draft, Visualization, Software, Methodology, Investigation, Formal analysis, Data curation. Elodie Massol: Writing – Review & Editing, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation. Yves Bas: Writing – Review & Editing, Investigation, Data curation. Svenja Schmidt: Writing – Review & Editing, Investigation, Data curation. David Bennett: Investigation, Data curation. Dominik Arend: Writing – Review & Editing, Investigation, Data curation. Alexander Gebhard: Writing – Review & Editing, Software, Validation. Luc Barbaro: Writing – Review & Editing. Sebastian König: Investigation, Data curation. Rafael Carbonell Font: Investigation, Data curation. David Sannier: Investigation, Data curation. Fernand Deroussen: Investigation, Data curation. Jérôme Sueur: Investigation, Data curation. Tomi Trilar: Investigation, Data curation. Wolfgang Forstmeier: Investigation, Data curation. Lucas Roger: Investigation, Data curation. Eloïsa Matheu: Investigation, Data curation. Piotr Guzik: Investigation, Data curation. Julien Barataud: Investigation, Data curation. Laurent Pelozuelo: Investigation, Data curation. Stéphane Puissant: Investigation, Data curation. Sandra Mueller: Writing – Review & Editing. Björn Schuller: Writing – Review & Editing. José Montoya: Writing – Review & Editing. Andreas Triantafyllopoulos: Software. Maxime Cauchoix: Writing – Review & Editing, Validation, Supervision, Resources, Project Administration, Methodology, Funding Acquisition, Conceptualization.

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David Funosas.

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Funosas, D., Massol, E., Bas, Y. et al. A finely annotated dataset for the automated acoustic identification of European Orthoptera and Cicadidae.
Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-026-07150-1

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