Rapid Acoustic Survey for Biodiversity Appraisal

Biodiversity assessment remains one of the most difficult challenges encountered by ecologists and conservation biologists. This task is becoming even more urgent with the current increase of habitat loss. Many methods–from rapid biodiversity assessments (RBA) to all-taxa biodiversity inventories (ATBI)–have been developed for decades to estimate local species richness. However, these methods are costly and invasive. Several animals–birds, mammals, amphibians, fishes and arthropods–produce sounds when moving, communicating or sensing their environment. Here we propose a new concept and method to describe biodiversity. We suggest to forego species or morphospecies identification used by ATBI and RBA respectively but rather to tackle the problem at another evolutionary unit, the community level. We also propose that a part of diversity can be estimated and compared through a rapid acoustic analysis of the sound produced by animal communities. We produced α and β diversity indexes that we first tested with 540 simulated acoustic communities. The α index, which measures acoustic entropy, shows a logarithmic correlation with the number of species within the acoustic community. The β index, which estimates both temporal and spectral dissimilarities, is linearly linked to the number of unshared species between acoustic communities. We then applied both indexes to two closely spaced Tanzanian dry lowland coastal forests. Indexes reveal for this small sample a lower acoustic diversity for the most disturbed forest and acoustic dissimilarities between the two forests suggest that degradation could have significantly decreased and modified community composition. Our results demonstrate for the first time that an indicator of biological diversity can be reliably obtained in a non-invasive way and with a limited sampling effort. This new approach may facilitate the appraisal of animal diversity at large spatial and temporal scales

Structural and Random Vibration Analysis of LEDs Conductive Polymer Interconnections

Abstract Many devices consist of electronic parts and can be operated in a certain vibration environment for some instant without undergoing failure. Interconnection or joint plays a very important role in electronic devices to connect various electrical and mechanical parts altogether. The main objective of this study is to investigate the effect of interconnection performance under vibration loading in terms of natural frequency, mode shapes and transfer function. Four different models of LEDs are built for pull strength and vibration tests. The structural analysis of these models are carried out by using universal testing machine. The dynamic responses of four build matrices under certain random frequency are observed by random vibration analysis. In structural analysis, the samples are subjected to vertical displacement loading while in random vibration analysis, the models run in a frequency range of 3 Hz to 500 Hz. It is observed that the structure of the adhesive joints affect the strength of interconnection between circuit pad and LED joints. Furthermore, FEA analysis is also carried out to determine the stresses at solder joint under vibration condition. The models are excited from natural frequency and good comparison of the experimental results and FEA analysis are observed.</jats:p