Glossary

Plain-English definitions for the terms you’ll meet around the dashboard.

Analysis window — the three seconds of audio the model looks at in one go. A 15-second recording is five windows, or more if they overlap.

Banding code — the four-letter shorthand ornithologists use for a species (e.g. NOCA = Northern Cardinal, AMRO = American Robin). BirdNet-Behavior shows it in each species’ colored avatar.

BirdNET / BirdNET+ — the neural network that identifies birds from sound, developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. This app runs BirdNET V2.4 by default (the network BirdNET-Pi runs) and can run the “BirdNET+ V3.0” preview instead; see Installation.

Co-occurrence — how often two species are heard in the same five-minute block of the same day, as a share of the blocks in which either was heard (their overlap, from 0 to 1). Two birds that are merely common are not a strong pair; two that are nearly always heard together are. It is association, not a test against chance. See Behavioral Analytics.

Confidence — the model’s certainty in an identification, from 0 to 1 (shown as a percentage). A detection is only logged if its confidence clears the threshold.

Dawn chorus — the burst of bird song around sunrise. The circadian polar plot shows when each species is most vocal across the day.

Detection — one identification event: a species, a time, a confidence, and (usually) a short audio clip.

Life list — a birder’s running list of every species they’ve ever recorded, each counted once. See Species & the Life List.

Mel spectrogram — the visual “fingerprint” of a sound (frequency over time) that the model actually looks at. The live spectrogram shows it in real time.

Offsite backup — a copy of the database somewhere that is not the station’s own SD card, encrypted before it leaves. The weekly snapshot in backups/ protects against a corrupt page; only an offsite copy protects against the card. See Backups & Recovery.

Phenology — the timing of seasonal events. Migration phenology is when migratory species arrive and depart through the year — the ridgeline chart on the Migration tab of Patterns.

Quarantine — a holding queue for borderline rare-bird detections, so a human can approve or reject them before they join your life list. See the review queue.

Repeat confirmation — a filter that records a species only when enough of the analysis windows around it heard the same thing. A real bird sings across several; an artefact usually fires once. Needs overlapping windows to mean anything. See Tuning.

RTSP — a streaming protocol many IP cameras use. BirdNet-Behavior can listen to an RTSP stream’s audio as if it were a microphone.

Sensitivity — a BirdNET parameter (0.5–1.5) that makes the model more eager or more conservative. See Tuning.

SF threshold (species-frequency) — a filter that uses your location and the week of the year to down-weight species that shouldn’t plausibly be present. See Tuning.

SNR (signal-to-noise ratio) — how loud the bird is relative to background noise, in decibels (dB). Higher is cleaner. Shown on the Audio level meters.

Streamgraph — a flowing, stacked area chart (used for activity over time) drawn from a centered baseline so each band’s thickness shows that species’ share.

Resident vs. migrant — a resident species is present year-round; a migrant only passes through seasonally. Behavioral analytics classifies which is which from your data.