BirdSet: A Dataset and Benchmark for Classification in Avian Bioacoustics

Deep learning (DL) models have emerged as a powerful tool in avian bioacoustics to assess environmental health. To maximize the potential of cost-effective and minimal-invasive passive acoustic monitoring (PAM), DL models must analyze bird vocalizations across a wide range of species and environmental conditions. However, data fragmentation challenges a comprehensive evaluation of generalization performance. Therefore, we introduce the BirdSet dataset, comprising approximately 520,000 global bird recordings for training and over 400 hours of PAM recordings for testing. Our benchmark offers baselines for several DL models to enhance comparability and consolidate research across studies, along with code implementations that include comprehensive training and evaluation protocols.