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🔬 Computational Biology · Citizen Science

Turn bird calls into real student understanding of the environment.

WREN builds and donates AI-powered listening stations — a Raspberry Pi running open-source BirdNet-Go — to schools and marine institutes, so students can discover the birds in their own backyard and contribute to global science.

🎁 Request a free BirdPi See how it works →

6,000+bird species the AI can hear

~5Wpower · runs 24/7

100%open source & free to schools

● LIVE DETECTION

🎙️Mic outside

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Raspberry Pi

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🤖BirdNet AI

🐦 Anna's Hummingbird detected94%

🌿 Our Mission

Hands-on science, powered by the birds outside the window

WREN distributes BirdNet-Go systems to classrooms, giving students the tools to understand their local ecosystems by monitoring the sounds of their local birds

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Computational biology

Students see real machine learning at work — turning raw audio into spectrograms and species predictions with a neural network.

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Place-based learning

Lessons connect to the birds in your schoolyard, making biology and environmental science tangible and local.

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Global impact

Every detection is shared with BirdWeather, contributing to worldwide citizen-science datasets used by real researchers.

⚙️ How it works

From a chirp outside to data scientists worldwide

The whole pipeline runs on a tiny computer the size of a deck of cards — no field researchers needed.

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1 · Listen

A weatherproof microphone records 48kHz audio outdoors, 24/7.

2 · Process

The Raspberry Pi splits audio into 3-second chunks and filters noise.

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3 · Identify

BirdNet's neural net reads the spectrogram and names the species.

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4 · Display

Detections appear live on a local web dashboard with confidence scores.

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5 · Share

Verified detections are sent to BirdWeather for global research.

🔬 The computational biology

How a computer learns to hear a bird

Bioacoustics sits at the intersection of biology, physics, and computer science — and it's the perfect way to make AI concrete for students.

🔊 Sound becomes an image

A Fast Fourier Transform converts each audio clip into a spectrogram — a 2D picture of frequency over time. Every species has its own visual "fingerprint."

🧠 A neural network reads it

A convolutional neural network (CNN) — the same kind of model used for image recognition — classifies that spectrogram and outputs a probability for each species.

📈 Confidence & analysis

Each detection comes with a confidence score, stored in a local SQLite database. Students can export the data and analyze it in Python with pandas and matplotlib.

▸ Live spectrogram

audio → FFT → spectrogram → CNN → species

The hardware

A research lab that fits in your hand

Low cost, low power, and fully programmable — the BirdPi is built to run quietly in a classroom for years.

PlatformPlatform Raspberry Pi in an indoor enclosure
MicrophoneWeatherproof outdoor housing, 48kHz audio
SoftwareBirdNet-Go — open source, written in Go
Power~5W · runs continuously, plugs in indoors
OutputLocal web dashboard + BirdWeather cloud API

📡 Why it matters

Birds are important indicators of ecosystem health

Acoustic monitoring is passive, scalable, and runs around the clock. Every station adds to a picture researchers can't build alone.

0bird species identifiable by the AI

0BirdWeather stations worldwide

0estimated decline in N. American birds since 1970

24/7continuous, non-invasive monitoring

North America has lost ~3 billion birds since 1970 (Cornell Lab, 2019). Monitoring at scale has never mattered more.

📚 Classroom-ready lessons

Every BirdPi comes with a lesson plan

Standards-friendly presentations that walk students through the science, the system, and a hands-on activity. Download and preview them below.

🦜 Grades 6–8

Middle School: Listen Up!

🐦 Why birds matter as environmental sensors
⚙️ How the detector works, step by step
🔍 Bay Area birds you might find
🎉 A predict-map-track class activity

⬇ Download (.pptx)

🧬 Grades 9–12

High School: Computational Bioacoustics

🤖 Machine learning, CNNs & spectrograms
Embedded systems & software architecture
📊 Data collection & analysis in Python
🌐 Citizen science & open data