What is it?
Officially born in 2014, at the occasion of an international meeting organized at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle, ecoacoustics is an emerging discipline, both theoretical and applied, that studies sound over large spatial and long time scales to monitor biodiversity and to tackle ecology and conservation research questions.
How does ecoacoustics work?
In practice, ecoacoustics consists firsts in regularly recording soundscapes with autonomous recorders ensure a passive monitoring of natural environments. The recordings obtained, which can accumulate several To of data, are then processed to infer relevant ecological information at different scales, including populations, communities, landscapes and ecosystems.
Ecoacoustics offer then a method to monitor biodiversity in a massive and non-invasive way. We just listen!
Copyright – Frédéric Sèbe
Among others, the methods developed in ecoacoustics aim at (1) estimating the space and time variations of acoustic diversity, (2) tracking the dynamics of the biophony (sounds due to living beings such as bird vocalizations), the geophony (sounds due to the landscape such as running water) and the technophony (sounds due to human machines such as car engines) across the diel period, seasons and potentially years (3) monitoring specific animal populations. All this ecological information can be used for the understanding of the structure, function and evolution of ecosystems. Ecoacoustics can hence increase our knowledge on biodiversity and on it threats.
Copyright – Jérôme Sueur
Ecoacoustics at the Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle
The Muséum national d’Histoire naturelle appears as a pioneer in ecoacoustics, in particular with the project EAR which manages several research programs in and out of France. The program dB@Risoux, developed with the Parc Naturel Régional du Haut-Jura, is part of and prefigures S⊙N⊙SYLVA.
References
Here is a short selection of papers defining ecoacoustics.
. Grinfeder E, Lorenzi C, Haupert S, Sueur J (2022). What Do We Mean by “Soundscape”? A functional description. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution. link
. Farina A, Gage SH (2017). Ecoacoustics: The Ecological Role of Sounds. Wiley. link
. Pijanowski B, Farina A, Gage S, Dumyahn S, Krause B (2011). What is soundscape ecology? An introduction and overview of an emerging new science. Landscape Ecology. link
. Sugai L, Silva T, Ribeiro JrJ, Llusia D (2018). Terrestrial Passive Acoustic Monitoring: Review and Perspectives. BioScience link
. Sugai LSM, Desjonquères C, Silva TSF, Llusia, D (2020). A roadmap for survey designs in terrestrial acoustic monitoring. Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation. link
. Sueur J, Farina A (2015) – Ecoacoustics: the ecological investigation and interpretation of environmental sound. Biosemiotics. link
. Sueur J, Krause B, Farina A (2019) – Climate change is breaking Earth’s beat. Trends in Ecology and Evolution. link