Freshwater ecoacoustics as a tool for continuous ecosystem monitoring

Copyright by the Ecological Society of AmericaPassive acoustic monitoring is gaining popularity in ecology as a practical and non-invasive approach to surveying ecosystems. This technique is increasingly being used to monitor terrestrial systems, particularly bird populations, given that it can help to track temporal dynamics of populations and ecosystem health without the need for expensive resampling. We suggest that underwater acoustic monitoring presents a viable, non-invasive, and largely unexplored approach to monitoring freshwater ecosystems, yielding information about three key ecological elements of aquatic environments – (1) fishes, (2) macroinvertebrates, and (3) physicochemical processes – as well as providing data on anthropogenic noise levels. We survey the literature on this approach, which is substantial but scattered across disciplines, and call for more cross-disciplinary work on recording and analysis techniques. We also discuss technical issues and knowledge gaps, including background noise, spatiotemporal variation, and the need for centralized reference collection repositories. These challenges need to be overcome before the full potential of passive acoustics in dynamic detection of biophysical processes can be realized and used to inform conservation practitioners and managers

Listening to Birds in the Anthropocene : The Anxious Semiotics of Sound in a Human-Dominated World

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Funding for much of the research on which this article is based was provided by the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK. I thank them and Tim Ingold for their support.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Evaluation of wilderness character as a framework for monitoring and measuring wilderness in Rocky Mountain National Park, An

2014 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.The Wilderness Act of 1964 (Pub.L. 88-577) provided for the statutory designation of wilderness areas in the United States through the creation of the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS). While the Wilderness Act specifies requirements for wilderness designation, it does not specify how agencies should manage wilderness areas, other than to "[preserve] the wilderness character of the area." Over the last 50 years a number of frameworks and methods for managing and assessing wilderness have been proposed. Recently, Wilderness Character Monitoring (WCM) has emerged as a promising framework for quantify the status and trend of wilderness character within management areas. While interagency efforts have been largely successful in establishing the WCM framework across all four managing agencies, few studies have been conducted evaluating the process of WCM, particularly as it relates to the broader goals of wilderness management. This thesis explores the potential for wilderness character concepts to inform wilderness management through the presentation of four chapters. The first chapter provides an introduction to the concept of wilderness character including a brief history of wilderness, its associated values and some management challenges. Chapters two and three present independent manuscripts that seek to better understand wilderness character from two different scales of analysis: conceptual overview and measurement of a specific wilderness value, respectively. Chapter two (first manuscript) evaluates wilderness character by applying the WCM framework to the newly established Rocky Mountain National Park Wilderness. The introduction and methods sections provide an overview of the study area, the WCM monitoring structure, and additional evaluative criteria used for the selection of measures. Selected measures are then presented in the results section, followed by a discussion of insights and considerations gained from both the final list of measures as well as the selection process itself. Chapter three (second manuscript) evaluates one discrete value or measure of wilderness: soundscapes. Specifically, this study examines the potential of Observer Based Source Identification Logging (OBSIL) to inform soundscapes assessments in wilderness by measuring audibility metrics. The two metrics used are a) percent time audible (PTA), which represents the extent within a given timeframe a particular source is audible; and b) the noise-free interval (NFI), which represents the length (usually average) that no non-natural sounds are audible. Findings from this study indicate both a high potential of OBSIL to inform soundscape assessments and provides several insights that support the need for better understanding of the wilderness acoustical environment. Chapter four concludes this thesis with a discussion of insights gained regarding the potential of WCM in the larger context of wilderness stewardship

Birding by Ear: A Study of Recreational Specialization and Soundscape Preference

Soundscapes have become recognized as an important natural resource. The traditional human-made versus natural soundscape comparison currently used in recreational resource management is challenged by borrowing soundscape components (i.e., biophony, anthrophony, and geophony) from soundscape ecology. This study is designed to evaluate the soundscape preference of birders. A three-component model of recreational specialization was used to evaluate how recreationists may differ in their preference for soundscape components. Data from in-person surveys collected at The Audubon Center and Sanctuary at Francis Beidler Forest in Harleyville, South Carolina were used in combination with surveys from online birding list servers to obtain a sample of 415 individuals with varying levels of specialization. The findings suggest that soundscape preference exists as biophony, geophony, and anthrophony and that preference for geophony differs among specialization segments

LifeCLEF 2016: Multimedia Life Species Identification Challenges

International audienceUsing multimedia identification tools is considered as one of the most promising solutions to help bridge the taxonomic gap and build accurate knowledge of the identity, the geographic distribution and the evolution of living species. Large and structured communities of nature observers (e.g., iSpot, Xeno-canto, Tela Botanica, etc.) as well as big monitoring equipment have actually started to produce outstanding collections of multimedia records. Unfortunately, the performance of the state-of-the-art analysis techniques on such data is still not well understood and is far from reaching real world requirements. The LifeCLEF lab proposes to evaluate these challenges around 3 tasks related to multimedia information retrieval and fine-grained classification problems in 3 domains. Each task is based on large volumes of real-world data and the measured challenges are defined in collaboration with biologists and environmental stakeholders to reflect realistic usage scenarios. For each task, we report the methodology, the data sets as well as the results and the main outcom

Ecoacoustic Methods for Multi-Taxa Animal Surveys in the Amazon

Tropical regions host most of the biodiversity found on Earth, but these species-rich areas are constantly threatened by human development and other disturbances that put this diversity of life forms at risk. To avoid extirpations of animal and plant species, scientists and managers rely on accurate monitoring techniques to retrieve information about population trends. This task is not easy, especially in the tropics, where there is often a lack of personnel to conduct surveys, a lack of funding, and the areas are so extensive that many countries need to be involved in monitoring (e.g., Amazon biome). For this reason, scientists are trying to take advantage of technological advancements to develop more cost-effective alternatives for multi-taxa surveys. While satellite imagery provides a richness of information about vegetation, it fails to provide direct measurement of the fauna. In this dissertation conducted in the Brazilian Amazon, I used passive acoustic recorders as a technique to collect reliable and verifiable information about the fauna. I show that the data collected with passive acoustic sensors is able to provide information about how the biodiversity of the Amazon changes with human disturbances, time of the day, and in different environments

Impacts of coffee fragmented landscapes on biodiversity and microclimate with emerging monitoring technologies

Habitat fragmentation and loss are causing biodiversity declines across the globe. As biodiversity is unevenly distributed, with many hotspots located in the tropics, conserving and protecting these areas is important to preserve as many species as possible. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the Ecology of the Atlantic Forest, a highly fragmented biodiversity hotspot. A major driver of habitat fragmentation is agriculture, and in the tropics coffee is major cash crop. Developing methods to monitor biodiversity effectively without labour intensive surveys can help us understand how communities are using fragmented landscapes and better inform management practices that promote biodiversity. Acoustic monitoring offers a promising set of tools to remotely monitor biodiversity. Developments in machine learning offer automatic species detection and classification in certain taxa. Chapters 3 and 4 use acoustic monitoring surveys conducted on fragmented landscapes in the Atlantic Forest to quantify bird and bat communities in forest and coffee matrix, respectively. Chapter 3 shows that acoustic composition can reflect local avian communities. Chapter 4 applies a convolutional neural network (CNN) optimised on UK bat calls to a Brazilian bat dataset to estimate bat diversity and show how bats preferentially use coffee habitats. In addition to monitoring biodiversity, monitoring microclimate forms a key part of climate smart agriculture for climate change mitigation. Coffee agriculture is limited to the tropics, overlapping with biodiverse regions, but is threatened by climate change. This presents a challenge to countries strongly reliant on coffee exports such as Brazil and Nicaragua. Chapter 5 uses data from microclimate weather stations in Nicaragua to demonstrate that sun-coffee management is vulnerable to supraoptimal temperature exposure regardless of local forest cover or elevation.Open Acces

How to integrate the soundscape resource into landscape planning? A perspective from ecosystem services

In landscape planning and policy-making, environmental sounds have only negative impacts on human health. The natural sounds that promote healthy and supportive environments remain neglected. Although the soundscape concept and approach have considered natural sounds as a resource, the related knowledge has not been employed in landscape planning yet. The purpose of this study is to advance existing state of knowledge to synthesize common preferences for soundscape resources, and then to propose an assessment method for landscape planning. We introduce a planning-oriented soundscape resource evaluation framework to guide a PRISMA systematic literature review. The review includes an in-depth analysis of 74 peer-reviewed journal articles and a meta-analysis for 21 of them. We find that (1) current research has under-explored the soundscape with regard to spatiotemporal evolution, health benefits, and preferences and values; (2) in green spaces, people from different sociocultural contexts exhibit common preferences for soundscape resources. According to these, soundscape formal characters tend towards naturalness, diversity, and appropriateness; (3) exposure to natural sounds does have positive effects on human health and well-being, but the degree of the effects was varied. In addition to birdsongs and water sounds, wind-induced vegetation sounds also have high values. Based on these findings, we suggest basic natural sound scores and categorized indicators for evaluating NSES. It can be implemented in Geographic Information System to produce place-based and comparable results under uncertainty. The results can help landscape planners better consider the contribution of the acoustic environment to human health, well-being, and quality of life, protect the areas of high-quality soundscape resources without actual human uses, and reveal the differences between the actual provision of aesthetic values and demands for nature-based recreation. © 202