Innovation experts at Blenheim Palace have developed an open source wildlife monitoring platform, which is being made available for free to schools, citizen scientists, ecologists and researchers around the world.
The BioAcoustic Stream Engine (known as BASE) is a real-time wildlife monitoring system that turns ordinary microphones placed in the landscape into round-the-clock biodiversity recorders.
Built by the Innovation team at Blenheim Palace, BASE can identify birdsong, the calls of bats, the hum of bees, and even the secret sounds of life beneath the soil – feeding live data into a public dashboard that anyone can access and explore.
The project is part of Blenheim Palace’s wider innovation programme, which uses the estate as a testbed for technology in heritage, sustainability and land management.
BASE is the culmination of world-class research from across the globe, including scientific-grade models such as BirdNET from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Chemnitz University of Technology for birds; BatDetect2 from researchers at UCL for bats; and BuzzDetect for bees.
These have been added to Blenheim Palace’s own models trained on grasshopper and bush cricket recordings shared by ecology groups. Blenheim has then built the engine that brings all of these scientific tools together into one live system anyone can run.
Now, a new wave of university research projects is helping shape the platform. AI students from UK universities are working alongside the Innovation team on real, deployed problems – a sign of how a historic estate is becoming a working laboratory for the next generation of nature-tech.
David Green, Head of Innovation at Blenheim Palace, said: “At Blenheim, we feel a deep responsibility as legacy landowners to care for this place, not just for today, but for the generations that follow. Tools like BASE help us understand the land better, and understanding it is the first step to protecting it.
“We didn’t build the science from scratch; we stood on the shoulders of brilliant researchers around the world and combined their work into something anyone can run. That is exactly why it is open and free – because the most valuable thing we can do now is share it.
“We’re only a very small part of the whole ecosystem, so we’re keen to see how we can work as a community to improve on the work we’ve done here. What excites me most is what comes next: schools turning their playing fields into living biodiversity labs, citizen scientists and ecology groups picking this up, training their own models, and together building the kind of large-scale picture of British nature that can show us how species are shifting and how the climate is reshaping the world around us.”
