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An artificial life approach to studying niche differentiation in soundscape ecology
Artificial life simulations are an important tool in the study of ecological
phenomena that can be difficult to examine directly in natural environments.
Recent work has established the soundscape as an ecologically important
resource and it has been proposed that the differentiation of animal
vocalizations within a soundscape is driven by the imperative of intraspecies
communication. The experiments in this paper test that hypothesis in a
simulated soundscape in order to verify the feasibility of intraspecies
communication as a driver of acoustic niche differentiation. The impact of
intraspecies communication is found to be a significant factor in the division
of a soundscape's frequency spectrum when compared to simulations where the
need to identify signals from conspecifics does not drive the evolution of
signalling. The method of simulating the effects of interspecies interactions
on the soundscape is positioned as a tool for developing artificial life agents
that can inhabit and interact with physical ecosystems and soundscapes.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, The 2019 Conference on Artificial Lif
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