Special issue on multimedia in ecology

The recent advances in digital cameras and sensors, as well as in network bandwidth and information storage capacities, have revolutionized our ability to capture multimedia data (sounds, images, videos, etc.) for environmental monitoring and are also greatly improving our ability to effectively manage natural resources. Sensors are used increasingly in a range of monitoring or exploratory applications, in particular for biological surveys: for instance, the Xeno-canto project¹ has collected thousands of bird sounds over the world, while as part of the EcoGrid project² several Terabytes of data (videos, images and audio recordings) of monitoring forest animals in Taiwan were collected. The proliferation of ecological multimedia data has opened new frontiers in ecology, thus making it an interdisciplinary, collaborative and data-intensive science and shifting from passive analysis performed by expert ecologists to proactively providing analytical information on the environment.