Enabling Multi-Species Bird Classification on Low-Power Bioacoustic Loggers

Abstract: This paper introduces WrenNet, an efficient neural network enabling real-time multi-species bird audio classification on low-power microcontrollers for scalable biodiversity monitoring. We propose a semi-learnable spectral feature extractor that adapts to avian vocalizations, outperforming standard mel-scale and fully-learnable alternatives. On an expert-curated 70-species dataset, WrenNet achieves up to 90.8\% accuracy on acoustically distinctive species and 70.1\% on the full task. When deployed on an AudioMoth device ($\leq$1MB RAM), it consumes only 77mJ per inference. Moreover, the proposed model is over 16x more energy-efficient compared to Birdnet when running on a Raspberry Pi 3B+. This work demonstrates the first practical framework for continuous, multi-species acoustic monitoring on low-power edge devices.