About
We build tools, run field projects, and publish research that helps people understand wildlife through sound, sensors, and environmental data.
Our mission
Wild Systems Lab is an applied research laboratory developing field technology, acoustic monitoring tools, and ecological datasets for understanding wildlife in human landscapes.
We build practical monitoring systems, support conservation projects, and publish research that helps landowners, churches, communities, and ecologists make better decisions for nature.
Our work brings together hardware engineering, field ecology, soundscape analysis, and open research — from the Demeter acoustic recorder to the Wild Churchyard Project.
Why acoustic monitoring
Sound is one of the richest and most accessible signals for understanding biodiversity. Birds, bats, insects, and amphibians all produce characteristic sounds that reveal their presence, behaviour, and abundance.
Acoustic recording captures wildlife activity without disturbance. Recorders can run unattended for weeks without any impact on the animals being studied.
Continuous recording produces temporal data that reveals dawn chorus variation, seasonal patterns, and year-on-year change — impossible to capture by point surveys alone.
Low-cost hardware and automated analysis means acoustic monitoring can scale to many sites simultaneously, building landscape-level pictures of biodiversity.
How we work
Step 1
We design hardware specifically for ecological monitoring — optimising for power efficiency, audio quality, weatherproofing, and ease of deployment in difficult environments.
Step 2
Our recorders go into churchyards, woodlands, hedgerows, and farms. We work with landowners and conservation organisations to site devices where they will capture the most useful data.
Step 3
We process recordings using a combination of automated detection software and expert manual review, producing species inventories, activity indexes, and time-series data.
Step 4
Findings are published as white papers, field notes, and open datasets. We believe ecological data has more value when shared than when kept proprietary.
Collaborators
Wild Systems Lab works with a range of partners across conservation, land management, research, and community ecology.
Partners in the Wild Churchyard Project — deploying recorders and helping congregations understand the wildlife in their care.
Farms, woodland estates, and private reserves undertaking baseline surveys and ongoing biodiversity monitoring.
Professional ecologists using Demeter for licensed surveys, EIA work, and habitat assessments.
Wildlife recording schemes, local nature partnerships, and parish wildlife groups.
Research collaborations on acoustic methods, species detection algorithms, and soundscape ecology.
Organisations running multi-site monitoring programmes who need consistent hardware, methods, and data outputs.
Get in touch
Whether you want to buy a recorder, discuss an analysis commission, or explore a research collaboration — we're happy to hear from you.