The Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis: An Ecoacoustics Perspective on Species Habitat Selection

Mullet, Timothy C.; Farina, Almo; Gage, Stuart H.

doi:10.1007/s12304-017-9288-5

Cited by 61 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 82 publications

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“…The fact that this index also increased with distance from highways means that bird acoustic activity did in fact increase, and also contributed to the increase in the NDSI. According to the Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis, which states that habitat selection behavior is based on habitat soundscapes (Mullet et al, 2016;Mullet, Farina, & Gage, 2017) birds might tend to live farther from noise sources like roads to avoid acoustic masking.…”

Section: Soundscape Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of highways on bird distribution and soundscape diversity around Aldo Leopold’s shack in Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA

Khanaposhtani

Gasc

Francomano

et al. 2019

Landscape and Urban Planning

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In the 1940s, Aldo Leopold took extensive notes on birds and their sounds near his iconic shack in Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA. His observations, along with his land management techniques, helped frame his seminal book, A Sand County Almanac. After his death, two interstate highways were built near his property and subjected this historically significant area to traffic noise. While highways currently represent vital transportation corridors, their observed and potential impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem services are cause for concern. As the area including Leopold's shack is now an Important Bird Area, we sought to evaluate the impact of these highways on the bird community and its related acoustic diversity. In 2011, 150 avian point counts were conducted in the three main habitats composing the landscape-upland deciduous forest, floodplain forest, and herbaceous wetland. In 2012, soundscape recordings were collected in seven floodplain forest sites using automated passive acoustic recorders. We described the local bird communities and measured their acoustic diversity. Linear models accounting for additional factors including land cover and vegetation structure characteristics showed that as the distance from highways increased, bird community descriptors (overall abundance and species richness) and acoustic diversity increased (when relationships were significant). On the species level, forest interior specialists were negatively affected by the presence of the highways, contrary to edge specialists. In addition to the direct effects of the edges produced by the highway structure, this difference might be due to the masking effect of traffic noise on interior specialists' low-frequency vocalizations and their reliance on acoustic, as opposed to visual, communication. We conclude that while habitat structure is a principle driver of bird diversity on a broader scale, highway-induced changes in both habitat structure and soundscapes may affect bird communities.

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Section: Soundscape Impactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of highways on bird distribution and soundscape diversity around Aldo Leopold’s shack in Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA

Khanaposhtani

Gasc

Francomano

et al. 2019

Landscape and Urban Planning

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“…Landscape characteristics influence and define the soundscapes in which birds communicate (Joo, Gage, & Kasten, ). Soundscapes are integrated by different types of sound, termed according to their nature: biophony (sounds from non‐human organisms), geophony (sounds with geophysical origin) and technophony or anthrophony (sounds emitted by stationary and moving human‐made object; Joo et al, ; Liu, Kang, Luo, Behm, & Coppack, ; Mullet, Farina, & Gage, ). Typically, anthrophony increases along the rural‐to‐urban gradient (Joo et al, ), and it tends to mask the other two components throughout the day (Liu et al, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anthropogenic noise masks bird calls, forcing them to call in higher frequencies and reducing occupancy of otherwise suitable habitat by species sensitive to loud sources of noise (reviewed in Ortega, ; Shannon et al, ). It has been suggested that anthrophony may be a source of information that birds use to avoid certain habitats (Mullet et al, ), and this effect may extend upwards, towards the airspace habitat (sensu Diehl, ; Diehl et al, ). Thus, migrating birds may modify their flight altitudes due to an effect of anthrophony‐dominated soundscapes, which likely represent non‐habitat and complicate communication.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Urban areas affect flight altitudes of nocturnally migrating birds

Cabrera‐Cruz

Smolinsky

McCarthy

et al. 2019

Journal of Animal Ecology

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1. Urban areas affect terrestrial ecological processes and local weather, but we know little about their effect on aerial ecological processes.2. Here, we identify urban from non-urban areas based on the intensity of artificial light at night (ALAN) in the landscape, and, along with weather covariates, evaluate the effect of urbanization on flight altitudes of nocturnally migrating birds.3. Birds are attracted to ALAN; hence, we predicted that altitudes would be lower over urban than over non-urban areas. However, other factors associated with urbanization may also affect flight altitudes. For example, surface temperature and terrain roughness are higher in urban areas, increasing air turbulence and height of the boundary layer, and affecting local winds. 4. We used data from nine weather surveillance radars in the eastern United States to estimate altitudes at five quantiles of the vertical distribution of birds migrating at night over urban and non-urban areas during five consecutive spring and autumn migration seasons. We fit Generalized Linear Mixed Models by season for each of the five quantiles of bird flight altitude and their differences between urban and non-urban areas.5. After controlling for other environmental variables and contrary to our prediction, we found that birds generally fly higher over urban areas compared to rural areas in spring, and marginally higher at the mid-layers of the vertical distribution in autumn. We also identified a small interaction effect between urbanization and crosswind speed, and between urbanization and surface air temperature, on flight altitudes. We also found that the difference in flight altitudes of nocturnally migrating birds between urban and non-urban areas varied among radars and seasons, but was consistently higher over urban areas throughout the years sampled. 6. Our results suggest that the effects of urbanization on wildlife extend into the aerosphere and are complex, stressing the need of understanding the influence of anthropogenic factors on airspace habitat.

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“…Besides, SS may be employed to test ecoacoustics hypotheses, including the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis (Krause ), Acoustic Adaptation Hypothesis (Ey and Fischer ) and Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis (Mullet et al. ).…”

Section: Applications Of Source Separation In Soundscape‐based Ecosysmentioning

confidence: 99%

Source separation in ecoacoustics: a roadmap towards versatile soundscape information retrieval

Lin

Tsao

2019

Remote Sens Ecol Conserv

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A comprehensive assessment of ecosystem dynamics requires the monitoring of biological, physical and social changes. Changes that cannot be observed visually may be trackable acoustically through soundscape analysis. Soundscapes vary greatly depending on geophysical events, biodiversity and human activities. However, retrieving source-specific information from geophony, biophony and anthropophony remains a challenging task, due to interference by simultaneous sound sources. Audio source separation is a technique that aims to recover individual sound sources when only mixtures are accessible. Here, we review techniques of monoaural audio source separation with the fundamental theories and assumptions behind them. Depending on the availability of prior information about the source signals, the task can be approached as a blind source separation or a model-based source separation. Most blind source separation techniques depend on assumptions about the behaviour of the source signals, and their performance may deteriorate when the assumptions fail. Model-based techniques generally do not require specific assumptions, and the models are directly learned from labelled data. With the recent advances of deep learning, the model-based techniques can yield state-of-the-art separation performance, accordingly facilitate content-based audio information retrieval. Source separation techniques have been adopted in several ecoacoustic applications to evaluate the contributions from biodiversity and anthropogenic disturbance to soundscape dynamics. They can also be employed as nonlinear filters to improve the recognition of bioacoustic signals. To effectively retrieve ecological information from soundscapes, source separation is a crucial tool. We believe that the future integrations of ecological hypotheses and deep learning can realize a high-performance source separation for ecoacoustics, and accordingly improve soundscape-based ecosystem monitoring. Therefore, we outline a roadmap for applying source separation to assist in soundscape information retrieval and hope to promote cross-disciplinary collaboration. (biophony), their habitats (geophony) and human development (anthropophony) (Dumyahn and Pijanowski 2011; Pijanowski et al. 2011; Sueur and Farina 2015; Krause and Farina 2016). By listening to biotic sounds, the composition of soniferous animals can be characterized and applied to assess wildlife biodiversity (Andr e et al. 2011; Saito et al. 2015; Lin et al. 2017a; Ross et al. 2018). On the other hand, abiotic sounds can be used to evaluate the ecosystem dynamics associated with

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The Acoustic Habitat Hypothesis: An Ecoacoustics Perspective on Species Habitat Selection

Cited by 61 publications

References 82 publications

Effects of highways on bird distribution and soundscape diversity around Aldo Leopold’s shack in Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA

Effects of highways on bird distribution and soundscape diversity around Aldo Leopold’s shack in Baraboo, Wisconsin, USA

Urban areas affect flight altitudes of nocturnally migrating birds

Source separation in ecoacoustics: a roadmap towards versatile soundscape information retrieval

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