{"id":181,"date":"2016-09-26T07:50:27","date_gmt":"2016-09-26T05:50:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/?p=181"},"modified":"2016-09-26T08:20:59","modified_gmt":"2016-09-26T06:20:59","slug":"listen-the-earth-breath","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/listen-the-earth-breath\/","title":{"rendered":"Listen to the Earth breath"},"content":{"rendered":"

The ecological role of sounds<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Sounds are used by vocal animals to perform several\u00a0vital functions: bats use active-produced ultrasounds to intercept flying preys and\u00a0avoid obstacles, elephants beat the soil to produce infrasound waves to inform others groups of their presence. Male songbirds perform complex songs to attract females and to defend territories from competitors. Sounds may be used collectively by vocal animals like mammals, birds, frogs or insects to produce high informative choruses at dawn and dusk.<\/p>\n

The investigation of the role of the sounds in the ecology of several groups of animals (from insects to whales and shrimps), either living in high mountains, in tropical forests or in deep oceanic waters, represents an important advancement for the knowledge of Earth diversity and complexity.<\/p>\n

Ecoacoustics a novel ecological discipline<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Ecoacoustics is a new entry between the disciplines\u00a0that investigate the ecology of the natural systems<\/a>. It was recognized as an independent branch of the ecology at the first\u00a0Ecoacoustics Congress<\/a>\u00a0in Paris in 2014 and\u00a0the International Society of Ecoacoustics (ISE)<\/a>\u00a0was established. Since 2014, the ISE has been growing and attracting hundreds of scientists from the entire world.<\/p>\n

This advancement has been possible thanks to new theories about the cognitive mechanisms used by vocal animals to communicate and to track resources, e.g.\u00a0the Ecofield hypothesis<\/a>,\u00a0Soundtope hypothesis<\/a>,\u00a0Acoustic community hypothesis<\/a>,\u00a0Ecoacoustic events model<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sounds are used by vocal animals to perform several\u00a0vital functions.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Technologies and passive recording<\/strong><\/h2>\n

As field naturalist my interest on the sounds of nature dates back to the 70\u2019s when just graduated was used to count birds based on their acoustic cues. However, despite the awareness that sound information is an essential part of the ecological complexity, I had to wait until year\u00a02000 to have available\u00a0autonomous field recorders<\/a>\u00a0that can set date, time of recording and some environmental parameters like temperature, humidity, luminosity and atmospheric pressure. Contemporarily, digital memories of great capacity (128 Gb) and Li-Ion rechargeable batteries have improved the efficiency of this tool that can autonomously operate for a long time.<\/p>\n

Sounds\u00a0may be used to identify species and to understand the dynamic of\u00a0acoustic communities in areas\u00a0like tropics or oceans where the\u00a0identification of species remains highly problematic. The\u00a0noninvasiveness of the passive recording and the possibility to make\u00a0a post-processing analysis\u00a0in lab offers new opportunities for a long-term researcher also in remote regions.<\/p>\n

The EEDI model<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Despite the recent improvements in the field of recording, the ecoacoustic approach still faces\u00a0difficulties especially when managing big data from long-term monitoring investigations.<\/p>\n

To overpass this serious difficulty, recently I’ve proposed a\u00a0model called\u00a0Ecoacoustic Event Detection and Identification (EEDI)\u00a0<\/strong>for\u00a0the analysis of big data based on the concept of the ecoacoustic events. The ecoacoustic events are\u00a0defined as emergent sonic patterns that are recognized by individual species during the completion of a specific function.<\/p>\n

EEDI is based on the idea that the combination of acoustic indices describes unique acoustic events like geophonies, technophonies or biophonies and their combination. EEDI is powered by the\u00a0SoundscapeMeter 2.0<\/a>\u00a0and is very easy to use.<\/p>\n

\"SET<\/a>
SET – Soundscape Explorer [Terrestrial]) digital recorder. Foto: Almo Farina.<\/div>
<\/div><\/figcaption><\/figure>Adopting\u00a0the combination of three metrics of the Acoustic Complexity Index family, I\u2019ve created a tridimensional event space (ES) in which the temporal and frequency patterns of every acoustic file can be described with details.<\/p>\n

EEDI allows handling hundreds of acoustic files\u00a0in a very small amount of\u00a0time.\u00a0EEDI has been designed for an ecological analysis of data more than for species identification, although in many cases identification of some species is possible.<\/p>\n

Ecoacoustic conservation<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Ecoacoustics is a discipline that will help to monitoring our Earth ecosystems extending benefit also to the application to biodiversity assessment, nature conservation and\u00a0management of protected areas. It represents a necessary tool\u00a0to create a public awareness<\/em>\u00a0of the risk of several biophonies being masked by the intrusion of human technophonies. There is a growing empirical evidence of the negative effects of technophonic sounds on the ecology of vocal animals.<\/p>\n

Despite the short story of ecoacoustics, this discipline offers many possibilities to scientists, practitioners, decision makers and politicians to improve the knowledge of our complex world. It\u00a0seems to be\u00a0especially important in tropical areas and in deep oceans where research is difficult and the risk of species extinction is very high and\u00a0requires\u00a0an urgent action.<\/p>\n

Sound performances in many animals are vital traits to accomplish many strategic functions. If such biophonies are masked by unwanted sounds many species may disappear.<\/p>\n

Thanks to ecoacoustics we have discovered that noise is a further threat produced by human intrusion to Earth ecosystems functioning and well-being.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this post Professor Almo Farina describes Ecoacoustics, the new entry between disciplines that investigate the ecology of the natural systems. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":483,"featured_media":183,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[80,86,83,77,84,78,81,85,76,79,82,87],"class_list":["post-181","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorised","tag-biophonies","tag-cognitive-mechanisms","tag-ecoacoustic-conservation","tag-ecoacoustics","tag-ecosystems","tag-eedi-model","tag-geophonies","tag-infrasound","tag-sound","tag-soundscapemeter-2-0","tag-technophonies","tag-vocal-animals"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/483"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=181"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/181\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=181"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=181"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blogs.springer.com\/lst\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=181"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}