David Tønnessen is a birder & wildlife guide interested in bird sounds, evolution, migration, and machine-learning in acoustic monitoring. His Master's dissertation focuses on Passive Acoustic bird surveys and machine-learning. He received his Bachelor of Science in Ecology & Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and writes about subtle field identification of birds in the column “Field Marks”, in the Colorado Birds journal. He previously worked as a coordinator for the Merlin Sound ID project at Cornell University, before transitioning to independent work.

Skills, experience and specialties:

• Guiding & Nature Interpretation

• GIS mapping

• R code, statistics & mapping

• Excel formatting

• Acoustic Wildlife Monitoring & Autonomous Recording Units

• ML models for Wildlife Monitoring (Merlin, BirdNET, etc)

Currently, he guides in Colorado for American Birding Guides, serves on the Colorado Bird Records Committee and reviews records on the citizen science database eBird.

Contributions and collaborations:

Outside of ornithology and natural history, David enjoys the outdoors, skiing, learning languages, good coffee, and salty black licorice.