xeno-canto-mcp

A multimodal Model Context Protocol (MCP) server for querying global wildlife vocalizations, bioacoustics recordings, and sound spectrograms from the Xeno-canto database.

Bridges the sensory gap in ecological AI by allowing language models and multimodal vision assistants to inspect wildlife audio streams, compare similar vocalizations, and analyze sonogram spectrogram patterns.

Key Features

• Global Bioacoustics Catalog: Search over 800,000+ wildlife sound recordings covering birds, bats, amphibians, and vocalizing insects worldwide.

• Multimodal Sonogram & Spectrogram Inspection: Exposes direct URLs to generated frequency-time spectrogram images (sono.full, sono.med, sono.small) for visual sound analysis.

• Species Vocalization Profiler: Aggregate a species' acoustic repertoire across songs, calls, and alarms.

• Vocalization Type & Taxa Filtering: Easily query by vocal behavior (song, alarm call, flight call) and taxonomic groups (birds, frogs, bats, grasshoppers).

• Quality-Filtered Audios: Filter by recording quality grades (A through E) to guarantee high-fidelity audio evidence.

• Acoustic Comparison Engine: Compare two vocalizing species side-by-side with high-grade reference recordings.

• Geographic Proximity Queries: Find audio recorded in a specific area via bounding coordinates.

Related MCP server: gbif-mcp

Available Tools

Installation & Usage

Running with uvx (Recommended)

uvx --from git+https://github.com/thesven/xeno-canto-mcp.git xeno-canto-mcp

Claude Desktop Configuration

Add to your claude_desktop_config.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "xeno-canto": {
      "command": "uvx",
      "args": ["--from", "git+https://github.com/thesven/xeno-canto-mcp.git", "xeno-canto-mcp"]
    }
  }
}

Development & Quality Gate

# Run code formatting check
uv run ruff format --check src tests scripts

# Run linting
uv run ruff check src tests scripts

# Run test suite with strict coverage floor (>90%)
uv run pytest --cov=xeno_canto_mcp --cov-branch --cov-report=term-missing

# Build wheel and sdist
uv build

# Run package distribution check & smoke test
uv run python scripts/check_dist.py
uv run python scripts/smoke.py

License

MIT License. See LICENSE for details.