Biodiversity and Noise: A Critical Connection

Julien (nonoise.club): Biodiversity is a fight for itself, but it's also directly connected to the fight against noise pollution. Urban and human noise is influencing and disturbing wildlife. To discuss that topic today, I'm glad to host Olivier Staehli the founder of the Swiss startup Synature Hi Olivier. How are you doin'?

Olivier Staehli: I'm doing pretty good, really, really excited to be here. Yeah.

Julien (nonoise.club): Me too, that's great to have you. Olivier, first question, why should human beings care about biodiversity?

Olivier Staehli: I think if we just look at the numbers, they're staggering. For example, in last 50 years, we lost more than 70 % of all animals, according to WWF. We also don't know by the order of magnitude how many species go extinct every single day. So could be one, it could be 10, it could be 100. So a lot of things we just don't know, but we know that the problem is increasing and humanity depends highly on biodiversity. Think about, for example, pollinators such that we have food.

Julien (nonoise.club): So it's a food question and a question of surviving for human beings. We'll deep dive into that. First of all, maybe let's introduce yourself. Olivier, who are you?

Olivier Staehli: I'm Olivier. I'm pretty much as long as I can think I'm passionate about wildlife. And at the age of 10 or 11, I started with wildlife photography, spent my free time as a kid in a forest. And I started tracking more more elusive animals in the Swiss Alps, which is where I'm from. So eventually I ended up tracking lynx and wolves. That was quite tricky, so I bought some camera traps. And it was a phenomenal experience, but after one year of tracking one lynx individual was called B320, it was killed illegally. And that made me aware of the desperate need for more wildlife conservation. That was back in high school, though, so I pivoted quite a bit, studied computer science, a bunch of internships and part-time jobs, usually between the business and tech sector. And then towards the end of my bachelor degree,

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm.

Olivier Staehli: I wanted to combine my interest for technology and nature. And I created a very raw first prototype of an intelligent microphone that could detect the howling of wolves. The howling of wolves, you might have heard it like in a documentary or I don't know, maybe in the real world. It's one of the most iconic sounds, but maybe even more importantly, you can hear it over great distances. And wolves are quite a hot topic in Switzerland. So I want to create something that...

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm.

Olivier Staehli: kind of helps to improve the coexistence of humans and wildlife. And it was a great project and we saw some potential in it. I continued throughout my master's degree, which I did a bit more on a business side. And now I incorporated Synature in June, 2024, together with my co-founder, Noah, who's an exceptional problem solver, which is very good to have on board when you're trying to build a startup.

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm. That's great. And what history? Why did it join?

Olivier Staehli: He's extremely passionate about all things computer science, but he also plays in two different bands and he plays multiple instruments. So he comes more from the sound and tech side into Synature and I come more from the ecology nature side and what combines us is the passion for technology.

Julien (nonoise.club): That's great. Why do you think that's the right moment to launch that? Because I understand your passion, but why do you think that's the right time to market such a solution?

Olivier Staehli: Mm. For two reasons. Bioacoustics has been around for quite a while. It was first mentioned in the 60s or even in the 50s. But only through recent advancements in AI, it really becomes powerful because now we can process loads of data in split seconds. And that's what makes it interesting and feasible in terms of workload. But then we can go further. and read more information out of the data that we have. And for that, we're also partnering with a lot of universities and with people from Silicon Valley just to be at the cutting edge of what's possible. And the second reason comes back to what we talked about at the beginning, like biodiversity is collapsing and we need to make nature more measurable.

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm.

Olivier Staehli: such that we can actually understand what's going on and only if we understand we can quantify things and we can put a price tag on it.

Julien (nonoise.club): definitely believe that's the right time to market even on investor side because a lot of investors are discussing right now about biodiversity and the way to measure it. So I think that's the right momentum. And I'm happy to discover this in nature. Can you explain a little bit deeper, even if not every listener is a geeky, is a tech guy, how does it work? You speak about a smart microphone. So can you explain it? We can add pictures on this podcast, but it's also an audio podcast. So try to explain it in a way everyone can understand.

Olivier Staehli: All right, yeah, I'll try to be as descriptive as possible. So we create the smart microphone, which is a hardware device. It's maybe as big as a football. And you set it up like a camera trap. So you just have like a ratchet strap and you tie it to a tree, maybe at like two meters height. And then you just push a button. It starts off. You check on your mobile phone whether the device is connected. And then you're good.

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm.

Olivier Staehli: It has an autonomy of about 90 days, so three months. And you also have the option to connect a solar panel. And then if you're in an open space, have unlimited autonomy. If you're in a rainforest, it's a bit of a different story. But that's why we create this autonomy of three months. And then it streams data to the cloud words analyzed with AI and signal processing algorithms. And then you have a data management platform that we call SynAPP And on SynAPP,

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm. Okay. Mm-hmm. Okay.

Olivier Staehli: You can first of all manage your devices. You see whether they still have battery. You also get an alert if they've been moved. And of course, you see the location and the audio data that's been collected. And then the real interesting part is the analytics page, where you see at one glance the species richness. So that's just number of species that we detected. Then number of invasive species. the species that shouldn't be in a certain area and usually destroy the ecosystem. and then also endangered species because that's usually kind of the main categories that are of immediate interest. And then you see also that the whole species breakdown, how many species has been detected and at what point. And then we give users the option to customize, for example, that you can pick favorites if you're really interested in wolves, you can add them to the favorite section, and you also get customized notifications. on your species of interest.

Julien (nonoise.club): You know I'm very working deeper on noise and noise pollution. We know that noise, the noise and human noise is disturbing nature. Do you measure that as well with your microphones? Do you have some visibility about that disruption?

Olivier Staehli: We want to go into that topic. We haven't been active in it because there are also some questions about data privacy. So we can measure noise pollution, but not necessarily human voices that we don't want to do. But we think it's a highly, highly interesting topic. And there are also publications that show that bird species

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Olivier Staehli: in areas that are very noise polluted, let's say cities, they vocalize in higher frequencies, for example, such that they can hear each other, or sometimes they also double communicate. So they repeat what they're saying. Exactly. And I think that can also be interesting for us in terms of, I think, detecting the species that are present is just the beginning.

Julien (nonoise.club): Okay. to make sure that they've been heard and detected.

Olivier Staehli: But if we can measure the wellbeing of animals, so stress detection, that can be really interesting. And noise pollution can be a first step into that direction that we one hand, we measure like the baseline noise, but also like how are animal communicating differently due to noise.

Julien (nonoise.club): why I speak about detecting or monitoring the heartbeat of the wildlife because it's being about the well-being of even of the wildlife. Who are your users? Who do you sell to? Because I understand the passion around that and it's a great topic but who is buying such a smart microphone and for what use case exactly?

Olivier Staehli: So on our website on signature.ch, you can join a wait list. And we've had a whole range of organizations joining that wait list. Now it's over a device demand that's far above 100. And there we see a very diverse interest group of companies. Some are national parks. Then some federal authorities that need to measure biodiversity or they need to monitor certain species. We also have academia that want to do more either about ecology or also behavioral biology. Then renewables is another interesting sector where you usually need to do, depending on the region you live in, but you usually need to do a baseline assessment of biodiversity, mostly birds and bats, in an area before you build something. And for that, it's also highly, highly valuable. Then we have organizations from agriculture. Yeah, so it's very diverse. So everybody who wants to make nature more measurable is a really interesting client for us.

Julien (nonoise.club): And they rent it, they rent this football-sized smart microphone for three months and they give it back to you. So you always have it on your assets, kind of. Or they buy it.

Olivier Staehli: They rent it, but they rent it for longer. So the three months is just the battery life, but then they can recharge it. Or if they have solar panels, it's autonomous. But yeah, the idea is to have a continuous data collection. And we just have a subscription per year where the device, the data platform, the data transmission, everything is included to keep it simple.

Julien (nonoise.club): Okay.

Olivier Staehli: But yeah, we recommend to have these devices continuously installed because that's also what makes ByQus really unique. We can listen 24-7 to what's going on. And then you really see trends in the ecosystem, opposed to where you only take a measurement maybe once a year with other approaches.

Julien (nonoise.club): That's great. It reminds me a few weeks ago, one of our listeners, think someone coming from Poland, complaining about... It was for a natural park and she was complaining about... I know the brand, I won't give the... do some bashing here and give the brand. But some big manufacturer of furniture was doing some noise in a natural park. And because of this industry... She was really complaining. She was leaving that it was disturbing for her but for the wildlife too My question is do you think regulation will increase on biodiversity will increase in the in the coming months and years and Even companies will need to measure biodiversity around our factories for instance. Is it is it a thing? Is it a topic which is which you see coming?

Olivier Staehli: I think it's definitely on the horizon. It's stringent in different ways depending on which region in the world you live in. It also depends on the political climate. So we used to have quite a strong push towards regulations. example, CSRD is like the most prominent framework in Europe. who has now been rolled back a bit. So I think it's a question of time. The more pressing the issue of biodiversity collapse is getting, the more stringent regulations. I think it's also, regulation is one part of it. But I think what really would bring the biggest value is if we can figure out things to where everybody benefits. a simple example is you can measure the bat and bird activity in wind turbines. And then you turn them off only if animals are there. And you let them run if animals are not present. And then all interest groups have kind of the most out of it because

Julien (nonoise.club): Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Olivier Staehli: Obviously nobody wants that lots of animals get killed, but the companies, they want to generate revenue to be sustainable. So if we can think more about solutions where kind of everybody agrees and wins, I think there is more value in that than just purely regulations. I think regulations are one part of it.

Julien (nonoise.club): Very, very great. We don't have lot of time today to speak about that, but I think it was a very great introduction into that topic of wildlife and of biodiversity and how do we connect biodiversity to sound and to noise, which is a topic coming again and again. I think I want to do, to record an episode about ocean as well, because ocean's life is very disturbed by us as well. So we connect both episodes as well. How can our listeners help you? You are a young startup, even if you work that topic for at least a decade, if I get it right. So how can our listeners help you and support Synature?

Olivier Staehli: I think on a lot of avenues, I we're generally interested in all sorts of use cases where acoustic monitoring can be of value. So if somebody has any ideas, we're to measure acoustic activity with AI. That's really interesting. We're currently fundraising and we're in the last steps of our fundraising round. So if anybody knows someone or is interested to join as a business angel, that would also be very interesting. And yeah, if anybody has activities in nature and want to make nature more measurable, we're right now pulling out the beta product, which is a really exciting phase, and we work closely with our customers. So if anybody is interested in that, we're happy to chat as well.

Julien (nonoise.club): That's great. Olivier Cheddi, the founder or co-founder of Synature. Thanks a lot for being here today on Fighting Noise, the No-No-No podcast. And really happy to have you in a few months or in a year to understand how you develop that. And I wish you well anyway. Thanks a lot, Olivier.

Olivier Staehli: Thank you so much. was truly pleasure to be here. Thank you. Bye.

Julien (nonoise.club): Show the pleasure. Bye bye.