Damiano Oldoni

• Developer at Research Institute for Nature and Forest

GuardIAS is a three-year Horizon Europe project starting in January 2025, uniting diverse expertise to address aquatic invasive alien species (IAS) management. This multidisciplinary initiative comprises seven interconnected work packages targeting all invasion stages (pre-border, border, post-border) to develop tools for disrupting invasions. Guar...

Early detection and rapid response are essential to deal effectively with new introductions of invasive alien species (IAS). Citizen science platforms for opportunistic recording of species are increasingly popular, and there is potential to harvest their data for early detection of IAS, but this has not been tested. We evaluated the potential of d...

EuropaBON EBV workflow templates The information provided here represents the EBV workflow templates collected during the EuropaBON online workshop on Essential Biodiversity Variable (EBV) workflows from 22–24 February 2023. The templates were designed to capture comprehensive descriptions about the three workflow components (data collection and s...

The information represents the EBV workflow templates collected during the EuropaBON online workshop on Essential Biodiversity Variable (EBV) workflows from 22–24 February 2023. The templates were designed to capture comprehensive descriptions about the three workflow components (data collection and sampling, data integration, and modelling) that...

Introduction Species distribution models (SDMs) are often used to produce risk maps to guide conservation management and decision-making with regard to invasive alien species (IAS). However, gathering and harmonizing the required species occurrence and other spatial data, as well as identifying and coding a robust modeling framework for reproducibl...

Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap‐derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber‐infrastructures, harmonizati...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are recognised as a major threat to biodiversity. To prevent the introduction and spread of IAS, the European Union Regulation (EU) 1143/2014 imposes an obligation on Member States to both develop management strategies for IAS of Union Concern and report on those interventions. For this, we need to collect and combine m...

Effective biodiversity management and policy decisions require timely access to accurate and reliable information on biodiversity status, trends, and threats. However, the process of data cleaning, aggregation, and analysis is often time-consuming, convoluted, laborious, and irreproducible. Biodiversity monitoring across large areas faces challenge...

Camera trapping has revolutionized wildlife ecology and conservation by providing automated data acquisition, leading to the accumulation of massive amounts of camera trap data worldwide. Although management and processing of camera trap-derived Big Data are becoming increasingly solvable with the help of scalable cyber-infrastructures, harmonizati...

Invasive alien species represent one of the major threats to biodiversity. Prevention is better than cure, but once invasive species get established, early management interventions are important to prevent further damage to nature and increasing management costs. Managers need to be informed as swiftly as possible when invasive species pop up in th...

Invasive alien species (IAS) are recognised as one of the major threats to biodiversity. The European Union (EU) Regulation 1143/2014 on the prevention of introduction and spread of invasive alien species imposes an obligation on Member States to develop management responses against a list of IAS of Union Concern and requires reporting on those int...

Species checklists are a crucial source of information for research and policy. Unfortunately , many traditional species checklists vary wildly in their content, format, availability and maintenance. The fact that these are not open, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) severely hampers fast and efficient information flow to poli...

Species checklists are a crucial source of information for research and policy. Unfortunately, many traditional species checklists vary wildly in their content, format, availability and maintenance. The fact that these are not open, findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR) severely hampers fast and efficient information flow to polic...

This report represents an extended version of the chapter on Invasive Alien Species of the Flemish State of the Environment report 2020. Invasive Alien Species represent a growing threat to biodiversity and ecosystem services in the region. This report describes the current situation of introductions and impact of alien species in Flanders and revi...

To support invasive alien species risk assessments, the Tracking Invasive Alien Species (TrIAS) project has developed an automated, open, workflow incorporating state-of-the-art species distribution modelling practices to create risk maps using the open source language R. It is based on Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF) data and openl...

The digital era has brought about an impressive increase in the volume of published species occurrence data. Research infrastructures such as the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), the digitization of legacy data, and the use of mobile applications have all played a role in this transition. More data implies, unavoidably, more heterog...

In this paper we describe a method of aggregating species occurrence data into what we coined "occurrence cubes". The aggregated data can be perceived as a cube with three dimensions - taxonomic, temporal and geographic - and takes into account the spatial uncertainty of each occurrence. The aggregation level of each of the three dimensions can be...

Observations reported by citizens are crucial to the ability of scientists to inform policy on biodiversity. This is particularly relevant in the case of preventing and controlling biological invasions; that is, the introduction and spread of species outside their natural ranges as a consequence of human activity. Such invasions of natural ecosyste...

To improve the suitability of the Darwin Core standard for the research and management of alien species, the standard needs to express the native status of organisms, how well established they are and how they came to occupy a location. To facilitate this, we propose: 1. To adopt a controlled vocabulary for the existing Darwin Core term dwc:establi...

The Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO) is co-managing three biologging networks as part of a terrestrial and freshwater observatory for LifeWatch Belgium. The networks are a GPS tracking network for large birds, an acoustic receiver network for fish, and a camera trap network for mammals. As part of our mission at the Open science lab...

Adriaens T., Groom Q., Vanderhoeven S., Davis A., Strubbe D., Reyserhove L., Desmet P., Oldoni D. & D’hondt B. 2018. The importance of citizen science for research, policy and management on invasive alien species. Natuur.focus 17(4): 185-193 [in Dutch] Flanders is a highly urbanized area in Europe and a global invasion hotspot. The management of in...

Reducing the damage caused by invasive species requires a community approach informed by rapidly mobilized data. Even if local stakeholders work together, invasive species do not respect borders, and national, continental and global policies are required. Yet, in general, data on invasive species are slow to be mobilized, often of insufficient qual...

Invasieve uitheemse soorten staan door hun impact op de biodiversiteit en de beheerkost die ze met zich meebrengen hoog op de natuurbeleidsagenda. Natuurvrijwilligers vormen een belangrijke schakel in het toezicht op uitheemse soorten. Vrijwilligers melden graag nieuw opduikende soorten, maar eens de soorten algemener zijn, zwakt de motivatie vaak...

The growing concern of citizens about the quality of their living environment and the emergence of low-cost microphones and data acquisition systems triggered the deployment of numerous noise monitoring networks spread over large geographical areas. Due to the local character of noise pollution in an urban environment, a dense measurement network i...

In this paper, the long-term learning properties of an artificial neural network model, designed for sound recognition and computational auditory scene analysis in general, are investigated. The model is designed to run for long periods of time (weeks to months) on low-cost hardware, used in a noise monitoring network, and builds upon previous work...

In this paper, a human-mimicking model for sound source recognition is presented. It consists of an artificial neural network with three neuron layers (input, middle and output) that are connected by feedback connections between the output and middle layer, on top of feedforward connections from the input to middle and middle to output layers. Lear...

Urban soundscape design involves creating outdoor spaces that are pleasing to the ear. One way to achieve this goal is to add or accentuate sounds that are considered to be desired by most users of the space, such that the desired sounds mask undesired sounds, or at least distract attention away from undesired sounds. In view of removing the need f...

Tranquil spaces provide restorative environments for urban residents and visitors and are therefore essential for health and quality of life. Tranquil spaces may be characterized through a combination of acoustical criteria, such as relatively low (percentile) sound levels and the relative absence of non-fitting sounds, and non-acoustical criteria,...

With the advance of electronics, sound level meters have become more powerful when it comes to analyzing and storing huge amount of measurements. In recent years, these devices have been hooked up to the internet and stream life data. In the IDEA project, the whole concept of a sound observatory is turned upside down by stripping the sensor nodes t...

Auditory attention is an essential property of human hearing. It is responsible for the selection of information to be sent to working memory and as such to be perceived consciously, from the abundance of auditory information that is continuously entering the ears. Thus, auditory attention heavily influences human auditory perception and systems si...

This paper investigates the relationship between wind turbine noise annoyance, exposure indicators, operational characteristics and environmental variables. A six-month field experiment at an industrial site near a residential area includes regular on-line annoyance reports, continuous 1/3-octave band noise level registrations, periodic sound recor...

It has been stated frequently that the soundscape as perceived and appraised by the user of a space, extends beyond the physical stimulus. We argue that, when introducing to human-factor in analyzing a sonic environment, the sounds that people hear play an important role. This holds in particular for rather quiet and infrequent disturbance of park...

Sound event recognition is a crucial aspect of human auditory perception. Hence, it has to be taken into account when it comes to understanding how humans perceive soundscapes. In that context, both unsupervised and supervised learning techniques can be used. On the one hand, this paper takes the latter approach for the recognition of sound events...

Urban soundscape design aims to create outdoor spaces with a pleasant sonic environment, and is of special interest where noise level abatement is not feasible or only has a limited effect. A possible approach is to mask unpleasant sounds by adding other sounds that can be considered as desirable by the users of the space. In this context, not only...

The research project IDEA: intelligent distributed environmental assessment, is aimed at using new capabilities offered by consumer hardware to deploy sound monitoring methodologies that approach human environmental sound perception as closely as possible. The low cost noise measurement nodes deployed in the network pre-process the sound to a data...

Ecological awareness increases energy production by wind turbines, but the considerable associated annoyance risk requires carefully designed noise control strategies when they are to be installed in densely populated regions. Well-chosen operational restrictions may reduce noise annoyance while preserving cost-effectiveness. This re-search project...

Binaural hearing is an essential property of the human auditory system. It is providing the brain with vital information about the location of sounds and this information contributes to the process of auditory stream segregation. Thus, models for the computational analysis of soundscapes would benefit from the addition of a binaural component. In t...

The soundscape approach to designing sonic environments recognizes the importance of the sounds that can be heard by the attentive listener. These sounds not only contribute to the affective component of appraisal of the sonic environment but also carry the cultural identity of the neighborhood. For the purpose of discussion and communication in th...

Environmental sound measurement networks are increasingly applied for monitoring noise pollution in an urban context. Intelligent measurement nodes offer the opportunity to perform advanced analysis of environmental sound, but tradeoffs between cost and functionality still have to be made. When using a tiered architecture, local nodes with limited...

In the context of computational soundscape analysis, few attempts have been made to imitate the human approach to soundscape perception. This paper introduces a biologically plausible and human-like auditory processing model for general soundscape analysis. The model is based on two types of neural networks. The first is a Self-Organizing Map (SOM)...

In this study, a long-term evaluation of the effect of vegetation on sound propagation is made, combined with the influence of local meteorology. Therefore, continuous measurements are performed in a densely vegetated park with two microphones. A first one is located at the border of the park, very close to a dominant road. The second microphone is...