Anthropogenic noise events perturb acoustic communication networks

Abstract

Anthropogenic noise sources impact ecological processes by altering wildlife behavior and interactions with cascading impacts on community structure. The distribution and magnitude of such noise has grown exponentially over the past century, and now inundates even remote areas. Here we investigate biological responses to prolific, anthropogenic noise sources associated with the physical presence of the source (vehicle noise and human voices) and disconnected from it (aircraft overflight). Bioacoustic responses to these noise sources were documented at 103 sites in 40 U. S. National Park units. The presence of bird sounds was noted in 10-s audio samples every 2 min, for 8 days at each site and related to the presence of human voices, vehicle noise, and aircraft noise in the same and preceding samples. Generalized additive models were used to fit smoothing splines to weight the influence of noise in past samples on the probability of detecting bird sounds in the present sample. We found that the probability of hearing birds increased immediately following noise events, and decreased about 2 h after the event. The negative effects were persistent more than 3 h after a noise event. The persistence of these responses – especially for noise from jets that were many kilometers distant – raises questions about the functional significance and ecological consequences of this altered activity, particularly in light of the widespread and diverse habitats in this study and ubiquity of the noise sources evaluated.

Anthropogenic noise in terrestrial Antarctica: a short review of background information, challenges and opportunities

“…It is important to note that physiological responses can sometimes be inconspicuous, lacking visible external effects on wildlife. Recent studies have explored how individual-level responses can scale into demographic and community-level processes (Kleist et al 2018;Jerem & Mathews 2021;Kleist et al 2023;Kok et al 2023).…”

“…Examples of studies using PAM to understand communicative, foraging and sexual behaviour can be readily found for a variety of taxa (Browning et al 2017;Gibb et al 2019) and in diverse environments (Desjonquères et al 2020;Sugai et al 2020;Van Hoeck et al 2021). Several studies have also used the soundscape to scale up the acoustic behaviour of different ecosystem components and link soundscape complexity to ecosystem function and integrity (Jerem & Mathews 2021;Kleist et al 2023;Kok et al 2023). In Antarctica, where more traditional survey methods, such as censuses and observational studies, are particularly costly, PAM can provide long-term information on species, populations and communities with little human intervention.…”

Auxetic hybrid metamaterial with tunable elastic wave bandgap

“…For instance, the negative elastic modulus [5] realized by a unipolar resonance unit, the negative effective mass density [6] realized by the dipole resonance unit, and the double negative acoustic characteristic parameters [7] and negative refractive index [8] realized by the integration of monopole resonance unit and dipole resonance unit. With the continuous development of AMs, they have great potential in the fields of acoustic focusing [9], acoustic communication [10,11], invisibility cloak [12], vibration and noise reduction [13], energy harvesting [14], etc.…”