S.W.A.N.
“Make local wildlife visible enough to matter.”
About SWAN
S.W.A.N. — the Scientific Wildlife Acoustic Network — is Ashmere Software's wildlife and acoustic monitoring project. It runs a distributed network of passive listening stations, hosted by schools, nature reserves, community sites, businesses and councils, that record local soundscapes and classify species activity through acoustic recognition.
Rather than treating each station as an isolated sensor, S.W.A.N. builds a shared local record: detections are connected back to specific habitats and communities, so a school, a reserve or a local group can watch how the wildlife around them actually changes over a season, not just on the day of a survey.
The network is built for three audiences at once. Schools get child-friendly live views, classes and assignments; reserves and community hosts get partner tools to log habitat actions and generate reports; researchers get access to the underlying detection data. S.W.A.N. is deliberately different from the rest of Ashmere's portfolio — it isn't a commercial product or an internal tool, it's a conservation and citizen-science network designed to be hosted by the sites that want to understand the wildlife around them.
Scope & limitations
- S.W.A.N.'s own principle: “Automated detections are evidence, not certainty — confidence, context and limitations must stay visible.” Results support interested host sites and researchers; they aren't a substitute for expert validation.
- Audio handling is built around wildlife monitoring, not human surveillance, and is designed to minimise capture of human speech.