An autonomous monitoring station is based on the integration of several hardware components (see the picture below).
In brief, the detectors of acoustic activity are activated when the sensors receive any input. After pre-processing and lossless data compression the captured audio is transmitted to the base station which performs the decoding of the message and the sound recognition process. In fact, on a periodic basis together with the audio information the sensor nodes transmit information from all other sensors (temperature, humidity, light intensity, wind speed, etc). This information serves for capturing the context of audio emissions and also for long-term monitoring of the environmental conditions in the target habitats. The real-time information about environment will also directly contribute for early forewarning against fires, and other human induced disasters.