Passive acoustic monitoring is a potentially valuable tool in biodiversity hotspots, where surveying can occur at large scales across land conversion types. However, in order to extract meaningful biological information from resulting enormous acoustic datasets, rapid analytical techniques are required. Here we tested the ability of a suite of acoustic indices to predict avian bioacoustic activity in recordings collected from the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot in southwestern India. Recordings were collected at 28 sites in a range of land-use types, from tea, coffee, and cardamom plantations to remnant forest stands. Using 36 acoustic indices we developed random forest models to predict the richness, diversity, and total number of avian vocalizations observed in recordings. We found limited evidence that acoustic indices predict the richness and total number of avian species vocalizations in recordings (R2 < 0.51). However, acoustic indices predicted the diversity of avian species vocalizations with high accuracy (R2 = 0.64, mean squared error = 0.17). Index models predicted low and high diversity best, with the highest residuals for medium diversity values and when continuous biological sounds were present (e.g., insect sounds >8 sec). The acoustic complexity index and roughness index were the most important for predicting avian vocal diversity. Avian species richness was generally higher among shade-grown crops than in the open tea plantation. Our results suggest that models incorporating acoustic indices can accurately predict low and high avian species diversity from acoustic recordings. Thus, ecoacoustics could be an important contributor to biodiversity monitoring across landscapes like the Western Ghats, which are a complex mosaic of different land-use types and face continued changes in the future.

Birds figure prominently in the traditional knowledge systems of many cultures by virtue of the diverse ways in which humans perceive these creatures, as religious totems, crop pests, food items, sentinels, guides and heralds, to name a few. This preliminary documentation of the traditional ornithological knowledge of the Solega people of southern India discusses the difficulties involved in obtaining a standard set of names that has the consensus of people living in widely dispersed settlements. Solega ways of using bird names in spontaneous speech have implications for theories of ethnobiological nomenclature. A comparison of bird species that are named in Solega, with those that are excluded from their lexicon, challenges some universalist claims concerning ethnotaxonomy. Finally, the ways birds are represented in Solega folklore and traditional ecological knowledge suggest that utilitarian and other cultural concerns, in particular the perceived real or potential interactions between birds and humans, have a significant bearing on Solega bird classification.

Place names in the Dravidian language Solega are analyzed, along with the nature of their referents. We discuss the lexicon of landscape terms, as these figure prominently in place name formation. Solega toponyms encode much information on not only cultural practices and religious traditions, but also forest ecology, with particular focus on plant and animal species distributions. Individual trees of great cultural or utilitarian significance are often named, as are the locations where animals congregate to perform specific behaviors. The incorporation of plant names in toponyms is a valuable resource for understanding critical elements of historical landscape ecology.

Objective identification and description of mimicked calls is a primary component of any study on avian vocal mimicry but few studies have adopted a quantitative approach. We used spectral feature representations commonly used in human speech analysis in combination with various distance metrics to distinguish between mimicked and non-mimicked calls of the greater racket-tailed drongo, Dicrurus paradiseus and cross-validated the results with human assessment of spectral similarity. We found that the automated method and human subjects performed similarly in terms of the overall number of correct matches of mimicked calls to putative model calls. However, the two methods also misclassified different subsets of calls and we achieved a maximum accuracy of ninety five per cent only when we combined the results of both the methods. This study is the first to use Mel-frequency Cepstral Coefficients and Relative Spectral Amplitude - filtered Linear Predictive Coding coefficients to quantify vocal mimicry. Our findings also suggest that in spite of several advances in automated methods of song analysis, corresponding cross-validation by humans remains essential.

The Solega community living in the Biligiri Rangan Hills (B. R. Hills) of Karnataka State, southern India, have noticed significant changes to the ecosystem of their forest homeland over the last four or five decades. Originally hunter-gatherers, who carried out swidden agriculture at a subsistence level, they were forced to abandon the semi-nomadic ways of their ancestors, and settle in permanent villages when these forests were first declared a wildlife sanctuary in 1974. In this paper, we present the views of Solega elders on the ecological changes that have taken place in the B. R. Hills, along with the subsequent changes in their interactions with the animals that also inhabit this landscape. The Solega way of life is accustomed to co-existing with wildlife, and they worship several animal deities. Their folklore and traditional ecological knowledge are also replete with ways of avoiding dangerous encounters with wildlife. Many of the detrimental ecological changes observed by Solega people are ascribed by them to the halting of their traditional litter fire regime, and the subsequent rampant growth of the exotic invasive plant Lantana camara, which now dominates the understorey in large swathes of the forest. These factors combine, according to Solega elders, to negatively impact the well-being of both animals as well as their own people. We hope to demonstrate how a deeper understanding of Solega language and culture, both essential facets of everyday life, as well as of their traditional ecological knowledge—can allow a full appreciation of the interactions between small Indigenous communities, such as the Solega, and the natural environment. We argue for a greater appreciation of, and engagement with, Indigenous knowledge in conservation efforts in countries such as India, where the protection of charismatic species, such as tigers, is often perceived to be at odds with the rights of small minority groups, such as the Solega.