Methods to measure biological sounds and assess their drivers in a tropical forest

Abstract

The study of soundscapes and biological sounds is becoming the focus of increasing scientific attention. Studying biological sounds involves the deployment of acoustic sensors to record sounds and the identification of animal species and other sources of sound in audio recordings. In addition, data extracted from audio recordings may be pooled together with ecological and human activity data to investigate the drivers of biological sounds. We provide a detailed method description of our study on biological sounds in a tropical forest and their drivers along a gradient of disturbance in Southeast Cameroon. We designed and implemented a research protocol to: make large scale audio recordings and identify animal species detected; collect ground-truth data on mammal and bird species; collect climate, habitat, and human activity data and describe remoteness and accessibility.

Applications and advances in acoustic monitoring for infectious disease epidemiology

“…In most scenarios, analysis of ecoacoustic is primarily concerned with the deconstruction and interpretation of the audio collected to interpret the biological patterns and processes that occur; for epidemiological studies, this will give discrete information regarding disease ecosystems or host/human communities, populations, or individuals [63]. Typically, the first step in the workflow is detecting and classifying acoustic signals from sound files for specific sonotypes.…”