BEsound: the relationships between land use intensity, organismic diversity and acoustic complexity - adopting soundscape ecology in the Biodiversity Exploratories
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Final Report Abstract
Soundscape ecology aims to understand how sounds from various sources—biological, geophysical and anthropogenic—can be used to understand coupled natural-human dynamics across different spatial and temporal scales. It has a high potential for large scale ecosystem monitoring especially if combined with other remote sensing tools. Vocalizing animals contribute to the biophonic component with different taxonomic groups (e.g. birds, Orthoptera) having characteristic seasonal and diurnal patterns. The acoustic niche hypothesis postulates that a higher organismic diversity should result in a higher acoustic richness and complexity. Land-use intensity affects biodiversity in various ways and therefore could have an indirect effect on acoustic diversity. Abiotic factors such as temperature and rain as well as noise from nearby roads and machinery have been shown to influence the calling behavior of vocalizing animals and therefor are hypothesized to have additional indirect effects on acoustic diversity. To test this conceptual framework we set up autonomous recording systems on a total of 300 plots in grasslands and forests established as long term research plots along a land-use and biodiversity gradient by the German Biodiversity Exploratories. Using autonomous recording devices, scheduled to record one minute every ten minutes, we collected data for a whole annual cycle. We applied structural equation modelling to analyze the underlying drivers of seasonal and diurnal patterns of the soundscape. Acoustic diversity was highest in May and June, with peaks during dawn and dusk. While such temporal dynamics were clearly driven by vocalizations of birds and Orthoptera environmental factors such as rain, distance to the nearest road and landscapes structure were also of importance to explain the variation in acoustic diversity among plots.
Publications
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(2014): Besound, a new project proposed to study the relationships between land use intensity, organismic diversity and acoustic complexity
Müller, S., Farina, A., Pieretti, N., Scherer-Lorenzen, M.
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(2018): Die Dialekte der Goldammer Emberiza citrinella in der Schwäbsichen Alb, Hainich und Schorfheide. Actitis, 49, pp.33–48
Frauendorf, E.
